Is Pirate Queen Based on a True Story? Lucy Liu and Eloise Singer Spill (EXCLUSIVE)

Lucy Liu and Eloise Singer Talk Historical Accuracy in 'The Pirate Queen' VR Game (EXCLUSIVE)

"It just becomes this very visceral experience being immersed in that world," Lucy Liu mentioned of the game.

Apr. 5 2024, Published 10:00 a.m. ET

Though the term "pirate" regularly invokes photographs of a peg-legged, eye-patched, scraggly guy or the fictional Captain Jack Sparrow, the most tough pirate in history used to be Cheng Shih, a girl who inherited her husband's ships and workforce after his demise.

Cheng Shih, additionally historically referred to as Ching Shih, Zheng Yi Sao, Shi Xianggu, and Shek Yeung, used to be active within the South China Sea within the early nineteenth century. But despite her iconic legacy, there may be so little media memorializing the female pirate.

The Pirate Queen: A Forgotten Legend is a brief VR game starting to convey Cheng Shih's true story to existence, produced by means of Singer Studios, a new recreation studio created by filmmaker Eloise Singer.

The eponymous Pirate Queen is voiced by none instead of Lucy Liu, and to have a good time the new release of the name, Lucy and Eloise spoke with Distractify in regards to the sport, including simply how historically accurate the VR game is.

Is 'The Pirate Queen' traditionally accurate? Well, quite.

According to Eloise and Lucy, the story of the real pirate queen used to be used as a supply of information for the VR sport, however the construction team attempted incredibly laborious to make the sport as traditionally correct as conceivable.

The Pirate Queen follows just a small sliver of Cheng Shih's lifestyles, fictionalizing a second when she can be beginning to take her energy and immersing avid gamers in a collection of puzzles to position them within the time period.

"When we first designed [The Pirate Queen], our artists created these beautiful ships that were made with wooden planks and metal nails. Assuming that like any ship, it would be made with wooden planks and metal nails. And we sent it to our researchers and they came back and they said, 'Well, actually, at this time in China, they use dovetail joints,'" Eloise said. "So then our artists had to remove all of the nails from all of the chips and replace them with dovetail joints."

It was the little details like that that the developers tried to diligently to get just right so the VR recreation was once like a step back in time.

"We took creative liberties with her story to make it feel like you were [there] on the night that she was coming to power," Eloise persisted. "So we heighten the tension in different areas to make sure that it felt cinematic and I felt like you were going through it."

"It's activated, and there's energy imbued in it," Lucy stated.

"They had researchers, they had specialists, those are things that I think we take for granted, oftentimes. But the fact that they chose to be [so detail-oriented] is also kind of wonderful because I feel like when you are in [the game], you can almost smell the room and the feeling of the temperature as well... It just becomes this very visceral experience being immersed in that world."

That's also part of what made the decision to begin Cheng Shih's story in VR really easy. Eloise and her group plan to expand The Pirate Queen into a lot more than just a online game, with a film, graphic novel, and TV collection, although The Pirate Queen: A Forgotten Legend is only one stepping stone in bringing her story to lifestyles.

"There was nothing more immersive than to step into her shoes and to embody this character — to row through treacherous waters and to climb up the side of ships to navigate through moonlit cabins," Eloise stated. "There's something really magical about being able to step back in time and to experience life in central China in the most modern technology possible."

The Pirate Queen: A Forgotten Legend is now available on Steam.

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