A Trip to the Moon

A Trip to the Moon (French: Le voyage dans la lune) is a 1902 French science-fiction adventure film directed by Georges Méliès. Inspired by a wide variety of sources, including Jules Verne's 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon and its 1870 sequel Around the Moon, the film follows a group of astronomers who travel to the Moon in a cannon-propelled capsule, explore the Moon's surface, escape from an underground group of Selenites (lunar inhabitants), and return to Earth with a captive Selenite. Méliès leads an ensemble cast of French theatrical performers as the main character Professor Barbenfouillis, in the overtly theatrical style for which he became famous.

Scholars have commented upon the film's extensive use of pataphysical and anti-imperialist satire, as well as on its wide influence on later filmmakers and its artistic significance within the French theatrical féerie tradition. Though the film disappeared into obscurity after Méliès's retirement from the film industry, it was rediscovered around 1930, when Méliès's importance to the history of cinema was beginning to be recognised by film devotees. An original hand-colored print was discovered in 1993 and restored in 2011.

A Trip to the Moon was an internationally popular success on its release and was extensively pirated by other studios, especially in the United States. Its unusual length, lavish production values, innovative special effects, and emphasis on storytelling were markedly influential on other filmmakers and ultimately on the development of narrative film as a whole. It was ranked 84th of the 100 greatest films of the 20th century by The Village Voice. The film remains Méliès' best known, and the moment in which the capsule lands in the Moon's eye remains one of the most iconic and frequently referenced images in the history of cinema. It is widely regarded as the earliest example of the science fiction film genre and, more generally, as one of the most influential films in cinema history.

## Plot

At a meeting of the Astronomy Club, its president, Professor Barbenfouillis, proposes an expedition to the Moon. After addressing some dissent, five other brave astronomers—Nostradamus, Alcofrisbas, Omega, Micromegas, and Parafaragaramus—agree to the plan. A space capsule in the shape of a bullet is built, along with a huge cannon to shoot it into space. The astronomers embark and their capsule is fired from the cannon with the help of "marines", most of whom are played by young women in sailors' outfits. The Man in the Moon watches the capsule as it approaches, and, in an iconic shot, it hits him in the eye.

Landing safely on the Moon, the astronomers get out of the capsule (without the need of space suits or breathing apparatus) and watch the Earth rise in the distance. Exhausted by their journey, they unroll their blankets and sleep. As they sleep, a comet passes, the Big Dipper appears with human faces peering out of each star, old Saturn leans out of a window in his ringed planet, and Phoebe, goddess of the Moon, appears seated in a crescent-moon swing. Phoebe causes a snowfall that awakens the astronomers, and they seek shelter in a cavern where they discover giant mushrooms. One astronomer opens his umbrella; it promptly takes root and turns into a giant mushroom itself.

At this point, a Selenite (an insectoid alien inhabitant of the Moon, named after one of the Greek moon goddesses, Selene) appears, but it is killed easily by an astronomer, as the creatures explode if they are hit with force. More Selenites appear, and it becomes increasingly difficult for the astronomers to destroy them as they are surrounded. The Selenites capture the astronomers and take them to the palace of their king. An astronomer lifts the Selenite King off his throne and throws him to the ground, causing him to explode.

The astronomers run back to their capsule while continuing to hit the pursuing Selenites, and five get inside. The sixth astronomer, Barbenfouillis himself, uses a rope to tip the capsule over a ledge on the Moon and into space. A Selenite tries to seize the capsule at the last minute. Astronomer, capsule, and Selenite fall through space and land in an ocean on Earth, where they are rescued by a ship and towed ashore. The final sequence (missing from some prints of the film) depicts a celebratory parade in honour of the travellers' return, including a display of the captive Selenite and the unveiling of a commemorative statue bearing the motto "Labor omnia vincit".

## Cast

When A Trip to the Moon was made, film actors performed anonymously and no credits were given; the practice of supplying opening and closing credits in films was a later innovation. Nonetheless, the following cast details can be reconstructed from available evidence:

- Georges Méliès as Professor Barbenfouillis. Méliès, a pioneering French film-maker and magician now generally regarded as the first person to recognise the potential of narrative film, had already achieved considerable success with his film versions of Cinderella (1899) and Joan of Arc (1900). His extensive involvement in all of his films as director, producer, writer, designer, technician, publicist, editor, and often actor makes him one of the first cinematic auteurs. Speaking about his work late in life, Méliès commented: "The greatest difficulty in realising my own ideas forced me to sometimes play the leading role in my films ... I was a star without knowing I was one, since the term did not yet exist." All told, Méliès took an acting role in at least 300 of his 520 films.
- Bleuette Bernon as Phoebe (the woman on the crescent moon). Méliès discovered Bernon in the 1890s, when she was performing as a singer at the cabaret L'Enfer. She also appeared in his 1899 adaption of Cinderella.
- François Lallement as the officer of the marines. Lallement was one of the salaried camera operators for the Star Film Company.
- Henri Delannoy as the captain of the rocket.
- Jules-Eugène Legris as the parade leader. Legris was a magician who performed at Méliès's theatre of stage illusions, the Théâtre Robert-Houdin in Paris.
- Victor André, Delpierre, Farjaux, Kelm, and Brunnet as the astronomers. André worked at the Théâtre de Cluny; the others were singers in French music halls.
- Ballet of the Théâtre du Châtelet as stars and as cannon attendants.
- Acrobats of the Folies Bergère as Selenites.

## Production

### Inspiration

When asked in 1930 what inspired him for A Trip to the Moon, Méliès credited Jules Verne's novels From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and Around the Moon (1870). Cinema historians, the mid-20th-century French writer Georges Sadoul first among them, have frequently suggested H. G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon (1901), a French translation of which was published a few months before Méliès made the film, as another likely influence. Sadoul argued that the first half of the film (up to the shooting of the projectile) is derived from Verne and that the second half, the travellers' adventures on and in the Moon, is derived from Wells.

In addition to these literary sources, various film scholars have suggested that Méliès was heavily influenced by other works, especially Jacques Offenbach's opera-féerie Le voyage dans la lune (an unauthorised parody of Verne's novels) and the A Trip to the Moon attraction at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. The French film historian Thierry Lefebvre hypothesises that Méliès drew upon both of these works, but in different ways: he appears to have taken the structure of the film—"a trip to the Moon, a Moon landing, an encounter with extraterrestrials with a deformity, an underground trek, an interview with the Man in the Moon, and a brutal return to reality back on Earth"—directly from the 1901 attraction, but also incorporated many plot elements (including the presence of six astronomers with pseudo-scientific names, telescopes that transform into stools, a moonshot cannon mounted above ground, a scene in which the Moon appears to approach the viewer, a lunar snowstorm, an earthrise scene, and umbrella-wielding travellers), not to mention the parodic tone of the film, from the Offenbach opera-féerie.

### Filming

As the science writer Ron Miller notes, A Trip to the Moon was one of the most complex films that Méliès had made, and employed "every trick he had learned or invented". It was his longest film yet; both the budget and filming duration were unusually lavish, costing 10,000 to make and taking three months to complete. The camera operators were Théophile Michault and Lucien Tainguy, who worked on a daily basis with Méliès as salaried employees for the Star Film Company. In addition to their work as cameramen, Méliès's operators also did odd jobs for the company such as developing film and helping to set up scenery, and another salaried operator, François Lallement, appeared onscreen as the marine officer. By contrast, Méliès hired his actors on a film-by-film basis, drawing from talented individuals in the Parisian theatrical world, with which he had many connections. They were paid one Louis d'or per day, a considerably higher salary than that offered by competitors, and had a full free meal at noon with Méliès.

Méliès's film studio, which he had built in Montreuil, Seine-Saint-Denis in 1897, was a greenhouse-like building with glass walls and a glass ceiling to let in as much sunlight as possible, a concept used by most still photography studios from the 1860s onward; it was built with the same dimensions as Méliès's own Théâtre Robert-Houdin (13.5 × 6.6 m). Throughout his film career, Méliès worked on a strict schedule of planning films in the morning, filming scenes during the brightest hours of the day, tending to the film laboratory and the Théâtre Robert-Houdin in the late afternoon, and attending performances at Parisian theatres in the evening.

According to Méliès's recollections, much of the unusual cost of A Trip to the Moon was due to the mechanically operated scenery and the Selenite costumes in particular, which were made for the film using cardboard and canvas. Méliès himself sculpted prototypes for the heads, feet, and kneecap pieces in terracotta, and then created plaster moulds for them. A mask-making specialist, probably from the major Parisian mask- and box-making firm of the Maison Hallé, used these moulds to produce cardboard versions for the actors to wear. Though other details about the film's making are scarce, the film historian Georges Sadoul argued that Méliès most likely collaborated with the painter Claudel on the scenery, and with Jehanne d'Alcy on the costumes. One of the backdrops for the film, showing the inside of the glass-roofed workshop in which the space capsule is built, was painted to look like the actual glass-roofed studio in which the film was made.

Many of the special effects in A Trip to the Moon, as in numerous other Méliès films, were created using the substitution splice technique, in which the camera operator stopped filming long enough for something onscreen to be altered, added, or taken away. Méliès carefully spliced the resulting shots together to create apparently magical effects, such as the transformation of the astronomers' telescopes into stools or the disappearance of the exploding Selenites in puffs of smoke. Other effects were created using theatrical means, such as stage machinery and pyrotechnics. The film also features transitional dissolves.

The pseudo-tracking shot in which the camera appears to approach the Man in the Moon was accomplished using an effect Méliès had invented the previous year for the film The Man with the Rubber Head. Rather than attempting to move his weighty camera toward an actor, he set a pulley-operated chair upon a rail-fitted ramp, placed the actor (covered up to the neck in black velvet) on the chair, and pulled him toward the camera. In addition to its technical practicality, this technique also allowed Méliès to control the placement of the face within the frame to a much greater degree of specificity than moving his camera allowed. A substitution splice allowed a model capsule to suddenly appear in the eye of the actor playing the Moon, completing the shot. Another notable sequence in the film, the plunge of the capsule into real ocean waves filmed on location, was created through multiple exposure, with a shot of the capsule falling in front of a black background superimposed upon the footage of the ocean. The shot is followed by an underwater glimpse of the capsule floating back to the surface, created by combining a moving cardboard cutout of the capsule with an aquarium containing tadpoles and air jets. The descent of the capsule from the Moon was covered in four shots, taking up about twenty seconds of film time.

### Coloring

Color prints were produced for a small percent of Méliès's films and advertised alongside the black-and-white versions at a higher price. From approximately 1897 to 1912, these prints (for films such as The Kingdom of the Fairies, The Impossible Voyage, The Barber of Seville and A Trip to the Moon) were hand-colored by Élisabeth and Berthe Thuillier's coloring lab in Paris. The Thuilliers led a studio of two hundred women, painting directly on film stock with brushes in carefully chosen colors. Each worker was assigned a specific color to apply to a frame of film in assembly line style, with more than twenty colors sometimes used for a single film. On average, the Thuilliers' lab produced about sixty hand-colored copies of a film.

### Music

Though Méliès's films were silent, they were not intended to be seen silently; exhibitors often used a bonimenteur, or narrator, to explain the story as it unfolded on the screen, accompanied by sound effects and live music. Méliès himself took considerable interest in musical accompaniment for his films, and prepared special film scores for several of them, including The Kingdom of the Fairies and The Barber of Seville. He did not require a specific musical for any film, allowing exhibitors freedom to choose whatever accompaniment they felt most suitable. When the film was screened at the Olympia music hall in Paris in 1902, an original film score was reportedly written for it.

In 1903, the English composer Ezra Read published a piano piece called A Trip to the Moon: Comic Descriptive Fantasia, which follows Méliès's film scene by scene and may have been used as a score for the film; it may have been commissioned by Méliès himself, who had likely met Read on one of his trips to England. More recent composers who have recorded scores for A Trip to the Moon include Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoit Dunckel of Air (for the 2011 restoration; see the Hand-colored version section below), Frederick Hodges, Robert Israel, Eric Le Guen, Lawrence Lehérissey (a great-great-grandson of Méliès), Jeff Mills, Donald Sosin, and Victor Young (for an abridged print featured as a prologue to the 1956 film Around the World in 80 Days).

## Style

The film's style, like that of most of Méliès's other films, is deliberately theatrical. The stage set is highly stylised, recalling the traditions of the 19th-century stage, and is filmed by a stationary camera, placed to evoke the perspective of an audience member sitting in a theatre. This stylistic choice was one of Méliès's first and biggest innovations.

Although he had initially followed the popular trend of the time by making mainly actuality films (short "slice of life" documentary films capturing actual scenes and events for the camera), in his first few years of filming Méliès gradually moved into the far less common genre of fictional narrative films, which he called his scènes composées or "artificially arranged scenes". The new genre was extensively influenced by Méliès's experience in theatre and magic, especially his familiarity with the popular French féerie stage tradition, known for their fantasy plots and spectacular visuals, including lavish scenery and mechanically worked stage effects. In an advertisement he proudly described the difference between his innovative films and the actualities still being made by his contemporaries: "these fantastic and artistic films reproduce stage scenes and create a new genre entirely different from the ordinary cinematographic views of real people and real streets."

Because A Trip to the Moon preceded the development of narrative film editing by filmmakers such as Edwin S. Porter and D. W. Griffith, it does not use the cinematic vocabulary to which American and European audiences later became accustomed, a vocabulary built on the purposeful use of techniques such as varied camera angles, intercutting, juxtapositions of shots, and other filmic ideas. Rather, each camera setup in Méliès's film is designed as a distinct dramatic scene uninterrupted by visible editing, an approach fitting the theatrical style in which the film was designed.

Similarly, film scholars have noted that the most famous moment in A Trip to the Moon plays with temporal continuity by showing an event twice: first the capsule is shown suddenly appearing in the eye of an anthropomorphic moon; then, in a much closer shot, the landing occurs very differently, and much more realistically, with the capsule actually plummeting into believable lunar terrain. This kind of nonlinear storytelling—in which time and space are treated as repeatable and flexible rather than linear and causal—is highly unconventional by the standards of Griffith and his followers, before the development of continuity editing. Other filmmakers performed similar experiments with time. (Porter, for instance, used temporal discontinuity and repetition extensively in his 1903 film Life of an American Fireman.) Later in the twentieth century, with sports television's development of the instant replay, temporal repetition again became a familiar device to screen audiences.

Because Méliès does not use a modern cinematic vocabulary, some film scholars have created other frameworks of thought with which to assess his films. For example, some recent academicians, while not necessarily denying Méliès's influence on film, have argued that his works are better understood as spectacular theatrical creations rooted in the 19th-century stage tradition of the féerie.

Similarly, Tom Gunning has argued that to fault Méliès for not inventing a more intimate and cinematic storytelling style is to misunderstand the purpose of his films; in Gunning's view, the first decade of film history may be considered a "cinema of attractions," in which filmmakers experimented with a presentational style based on spectacle and direct address rather than on intricate editing. Though the attraction style of filmmaking declined in popularity in favour of a more integrated "story film" approach, it remains an important component of certain types of cinema, including science fiction films, musicals, and avant-garde films.

## Themes

With its pioneering use of themes of scientific ambition and discovery, A Trip to the Moon is sometimes described as the first science fiction film. A Short History of Film argues that it codified "many of the basic generic situations that are still used in science fiction films today". Other genre designations are possible; Méliès advertised the film as a pièce à grand spectacle, a term referring to a type of spectacular Parisian stage extravaganza popularised by Jules Verne and Adolphe d'Ennery in the second half of the nineteenth century. Richard Abel describes the film as belonging to the féerie genre, as does Frank Kessler. It can also be described simply as a trick film, a catch-all term for the popular early film genre of innovative, special effects-filled shorts—a genre Méliès himself had codified and popularised in his earlier works.

A Trip to the Moon is highly satirical in tone, poking fun at nineteenth-century science by exaggerating it in the format of an adventure story. The film makes no pretense whatsoever to be scientifically plausible; the real waves in the splashdown scene are the only concession to realism. The film scholar Alison McMahan calls A Trip to the Moon one of the earliest examples of pataphysical film, saying it "aims to show the illogicality of logical thinking" with its satirically portrayed inept scientists, anthropomorphic moon face, and impossible transgressions of laws of physics. The film historian Richard Abel believes Méliès aimed in the film to "invert the hierarchal values of modern French society and hold them up to ridicule in a riot of the carnivalesque". Similarly, the literary and film scholar Edward Wagenknecht described the film as a work "satirizing the pretensions of professors and scientific societies while simultaneously appealing to man's sense of wonder in the face of an unexplored universe."

There is also a strong anti-imperialist vein in the film's satire. The film scholar Matthew Solomon notes that the last part of the film (the parade and commemoration sequence missing in some prints) is especially forceful in this regard. He argues that Méliès, who had previously worked as an anti-Boulangist political cartoonist, mocks imperialistic domination in the film by presenting his colonial conquerors as bumbling pedants who mercilessly attack the alien lifeforms they meet and return with a mistreated captive amid fanfares of self-congratulation. The statue of Barbenfouillis shown in the film's final shot even resembles the pompous, bullying colonialists in Méliès's political cartoons. The film scholar Elizabeth Ezra agrees that "Méliès mocks the pretensions of colonialist accounts of the conquest of one culture by another," and adds that "his film also thematizes social differentiation on the home front, as the hierarchical patterns on the moon are shown to bear a curious resemblance to those on earth."

## Release

Méliès, who had begun A Trip to the Moon in May 1902, finished the film in August of that year and began selling prints to French distributors in the same month. From September through December 1902, a hand-colored print of A Trip to the Moon was screened at Méliès's Théâtre Robert-Houdin in Paris. The film was shown after Saturday and Thursday matinee performances by Méliès's colleague and fellow magician, Jules-Eugène Legris, who appeared as the leader of the parade in the two final scenes. Méliès sold black-and-white and color prints of the film through his Star Film Company, where the film was assigned the catalogue number 399–411 and given the descriptive subtitle Pièce à grand spectacle en 30 tableaux. In France, black-and-white prints sold for 560, and hand-colored prints for 1,000. Méliès also sold the film indirectly through Charles Urban's Warwick Trading Company in London.

Many circumstances surrounding the film—including its unusual budget, length, and production time, as well as its similarities to the 1901 New York attraction—indicate that Méliès was especially keen to release the film in the United States. Because of rampant film piracy, Méliès never received most of the profits of the popular film. One account reports that Méliès sold a print of the film to the Paris photographer Charles Gerschel for use in an Algiers theatre, under strict stipulation that the print only be shown in Algeria. Gerschel sold the print, and various other Méliès films, to the Edison Manufacturing Company employee Alfred C. Abadie, who sent them directly to Edison's laboratories to be duplicated and sold by Vitagraph. Copies of the print spread to other firms, and by 1904 Siegmund Lubin, the Selig Polyscope Company, and Edison were all redistributing it. Edison's print of the film was even offered in a hand-colored version available at a higher price, just as Méliès had done. Méliès was often uncredited altogether; for the first six months of the film's distribution, the only American exhibitor to credit Méliès in advertisements for the film was Thomas Lincoln Tally, who chose the film as the inaugural presentation of his Electric Theater.

In order to combat the problem of film piracy that became clear during the release of A Trip to the Moon, Méliès opened an American branch of the Star Film Company, directed by his brother Gaston Méliès, in New York in 1903. The office was designed to sell Méliès's films directly and to protect them by registering them under United States copyright. The introduction to the English-language edition of the Star Film Company catalogue announced: "In opening a factory and office in New York we are prepared and determined energetically to pursue all counterfeiters and pirates. We will not speak twice, we will act!"

Various trade arrangements were made with other film companies, including American Mutoscope and Biograph, the Warwick Trading Company, the Charles Urban Trading Co., Robert W. Paul's studio, and Gaumont. In these negotiations, a print sale price of 0.15 per foot was standardised across the American market, which proved useful to Méliès. Later price standardisations by the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1908 hastened his financial ruin, as his films were impractically expensive under the new standards, After 1908, his films waned from the fashions of time as fanciful magic fell out of vogue.

## Reception

According to Méliès's memoirs, his initial attempts to sell A Trip to the Moon to French fairground exhibitors met with failure because of the film's unusually high price. Finally, Méliès offered to let one such exhibitor borrow a print of the film to screen for free. The applause from the very first showing was so enthusiastic that fairgoers kept the theatre packed until midnight. The exhibitor bought the film immediately, and when he was reminded of his initial reluctance he even offered to add 200 to compensate "for [Méliès's] inconvenience." The film was a pronounced success in France, running uninterrupted at the Olympia music hall in Paris for several months.

A Trip to the Moon was met with especially large enthusiasm in the United States, where (to Méliès's chagrin) its piracy by Lubin, Selig, Edison and others gave it wide distribution. Exhibitors in New York City, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Detroit, New Orleans, and Kansas City reported on the film's great success in their theatres. The film also did well in other countries, including Germany, Canada, and Italy, where it was featured as a headline attraction through 1904.

A Trip to the Moon was one of the most popular films of the first few years of the twentieth century, rivalled only by a small handful of others (similarly spectacular Méliès films such as The Kingdom of the Fairies and The Impossible Voyage among them). Late in life, Méliès remarked that A Trip to the Moon was "surely not one of my best," but acknowledged that it was widely considered his masterpiece and that "it left an indelible trace because it was the first of its kind." The film which Méliès was proudest of was Humanity Through the Ages (1908), a serious historical drama now presumed lost.

## Rediscovery

### Black-and-white print

After Méliès's financial difficulties and decline, most copies of his prints were lost. In 1917, his offices were occupied by the French military, who melted down many of Méliès's films to gather the traces of silver from the film stock and make boot heels from the celluloid. When the Théâtre Robert-Houdin was demolished in 1923, the prints kept there were sold by weight to a vendor of second-hand film. Finally, in that same year, Méliès had a sudden fit of rage and burned all his remaining negatives in his garden in Montreuil. In 1925, he began selling toys and candy from a stand in the Gare Montparnasse in Paris. A Trip to the Moon was largely forgotten to history and went unseen for years.

Thanks to the efforts of film history devotées, especially René Clair, Jean George Auriol, and Paul Gilson, Méliès and his work were rediscovered in the late 1920s. A "Gala Méliès" was held at the Salle Pleyel in Paris on 16 December 1929 in celebration of the filmmaker, and he was awarded the Legion of Honor in 1931. During this renaissance of interest in Méliès, the cinema manager Jean Mauclaire and the early film experimenter Jean Acme LeRoy both set out independently to locate a surviving print of A Trip to the Moon. Mauclaire obtained a copy from Paris in October 1929, and LeRoy found one from London in 1930, though both prints were incomplete; Mauclaire's lacked the first and last scenes, and LeRoy's was missing the entire final sequence featuring the parade and commemorative statue. These prints were occasionally screened at retrospectives (including the Gala Méliès), avant-garde cinema showings, and other special occasions, sometimes in presentations by Méliès himself.

Following LeRoy's death in 1932, his film collection was bought by the Museum of Modern Art in 1936. The museum's acquisition and subsequent screenings of A Trip to the Moon, under the direction of MoMA's film curator Iris Barry, opened the film up once again to a wide audience of Americans and Canadians and established it definitively as a landmark in the history of cinema. LeRoy's incomplete print became the most commonly seen version of the film and the source print for most other copies, including the Cinémathèque Française's print. A complete version of the film, including the entire celebration sequence, was finally reconstructed in 1997 from various sources by the Cinémathèque Méliès, a foundation set up by the Méliès family.

### Hand-colored print

No hand-colored prints of A Trip to the Moon were known to survive until 1993, when one was given to the Filmoteca de Catalunya by an anonymous donor as part of a collection of two hundred silent films. It is unknown whether this version, a hand-colored print struck from a second-generation negative, was colored by Elisabeth Thuillier's lab, but the perforations used imply that the copy was made before 1906. The flag waved during the launching scene in this copy is colored to resemble the flag of Spain, indicating that the hand-colored copy was made for a Spanish exhibitor.

In 1999, Anton Gimenez of the Filmoteca de Catalunya mentioned the existence of this print, which he believed to be in a state of total decomposition, to Serge Bromberg and Eric Lange of the French film company Lobster Films. Bromberg and Lange offered to trade a recently rediscovered film by Segundo de Chomón for the hand-colored print, and Gimenez accepted. Bromberg and Lange consulted various specialist laboratories in an attempt to restore the film, but because the reel of film had apparently decomposed into a rigid mass, none believed restoration to be possible. Consequently, Bromberg and Lange themselves set to work separating the film frames, discovering that only the edges of the film stock had decomposed and congealed together, and thus that many of the frames themselves were still salvageable. Between 2002 and 2005, various digitisation efforts allowed 13,375 fragments of images from the print to be saved. In 2010, a complete restoration of the hand-colored print was launched by Lobster Films, the Groupama Gan Foundation for Cinema, and the Technicolor Foundation for Cinema Heritage. The digitised fragments of the hand-colored print were reassembled and restored, with missing frames recreated with the help of a black-and-white print in the possession of the Méliès family, and time-converted to run at an authentic silent-film speed, 16 frames per second. The restoration was completed in 2011 at Technicolor's laboratories in Los Angeles. Restoration costs were \$1 million.

The restored version premiered on 11 May 2011, eighteen years after its discovery and 109 years after its original release, at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, with a new soundtrack by the French band Air. The restoration was released by Flicker Alley in a 2-disc Blu-ray and DVD edition also including The Extraordinary Voyage, a feature-length documentary by Bromberg and Lange about the film's restoration, in 2012. In The New York Times, A. O. Scott called the restoration "surely a cinematic highlight of the year, maybe the century."

## Legacy

As A Short History of Film notes, A Trip to the Moon combined "spectacle, sensation, and technical wizardry to create a cosmic fantasy that was an international sensation." It was profoundly influential on later filmmakers, bringing creativity to the cinematic medium and offering fantasy for pure entertainment, a rare goal in film at the time. In addition, Méliès's innovative editing and special effects techniques were widely imitated and became important elements of the medium. The film also spurred on the development of cinematic science fiction and fantasy by demonstrating that scientific themes worked on the screen and that reality could be transformed by the camera. In a 1940 interview, Edwin S. Porter said that it was by seeing A Trip to the Moon and other Méliès films that he "came to the conclusion that a picture telling a story might draw the customers back to the theatres, and set to work in this direction." Similarly, D. W. Griffith said simply of Méliès: "I owe him everything." Since these American directors are widely credited with developing modern film narrative technique, the literary and film scholar Edward Wagenknecht once summed up Méliès's importance to film history by commenting that Méliès "profoundly influenced both Porter and Griffith and through them the whole course of American film-making."

It remains Méliès's most famous film as well as a classic example of early cinema, with the image of the capsule stuck in the Man in the Moon's eye particularly well known. The film has been evoked in other creative works many times, ranging from Segundo de Chomón's 1908 unauthorised remake Excursion to the Moon through the extensive tribute to Méliès and the film in the Brian Selznick 2007 novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret and its 2011 Martin Scorsese film adaptation Hugo. Film scholar Andrew J. Rausch includes A Trip to the Moon among the "32 most pivotal moments in the history of [film]," saying it "changed the way movies were produced." Chiara Ferrari's essay on the film in 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, which places A Trip to the Moon as the first entry, argues that the film "directly reflects the histrionic personality of its director", and that the film "deserves a legitimate place among the milestones in world cinema history."

## See also

- 1902 in science fiction
- List of early color feature films
- List of films featuring extraterrestrials

1902 French short film by Georges Méliès

Films based on From the Earth to the Moon


Sleeping Dogs (video game)

Sleeping Dogs is a 2012 action-adventure video game developed by United Front Games and published by Square Enix. It was released for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Windows. Set in contemporary Hong Kong, the story follows martial artist and undercover police officer Wei Shen who infiltrates the Sun On Yee Triad organization. Gameplay focuses on Wei Shen's martial arts moves, fighting, shooting and parkour abilities, and on gadgets that can be used for combat and exploration. Players must complete missions to unlock content and continue the story, but they may instead freely roam the game's open world environment and engage in both legal and criminal activities. The latter may incite a police response, the intensity of which is controlled by a "heat" system. Actions such as fighting, driving and racing grant Shen statistical rewards and earn the player achievements.

Sleeping Dogs' difficult and prolonged development began in 2008. The game was announced in 2009 as part of the True Crime series but was canceled by Activision Blizzard in 2011, as a result of the project's delays and budget issues. Six months later, Square Enix purchased the publishing rights and renamed the game Sleeping Dogs, without the True Crime license, but considered a spiritual successor. During development, United Front staff visited Hong Kong to conduct field research for the visual environments and sound. Square Enix London Studios worked with United Front for the development.

Upon its release in 2012, the game received positive reviews for its combat, voice acting, protagonist, experience system and depiction of the city; but its camera and some animations were criticized. Within one year, the game had sold over 1.5 million copies. New outfits, missions and add-ons, as well as three expansion packs, were released as downloadable content in the six months following the game's debut. A remastered version, subtitled Definitive Edition, was released in October 2014 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It features improved gameplay, setting and audio-visual quality based on community feedback. The macOS version of Definitive Edition was released on March 31, 2016, by Feral Interactive. The game spawned a spin-off multiplayer game titled Triad Wars, which was canceled in 2015. In 2017, a live action film adaptation was announced, with Donnie Yen set to star as Shen.

## Gameplay

Sleeping Dogs is an action-adventure game set in an open world environment and played from a third-person perspective. The player controls Wei Shen, a Chinese-American police officer who goes undercover and ventures out on a raid to infiltrate the Sun On Yee Triad organization. The initial missions of the game are a linear tutorial for controlling the character. After these missions, the player is allowed to explore the game's world and take part in side missions and other activities. Shen navigates the world by running, jumping, climbing over obstacles, swimming, and driving cars, boats and motorcycles. The heads-up display (HUD) interface features a mini-map that indicates targets, key locations (safe houses and contact points) and Shen's current position. The mini-map incorporates two meters: one shows Shen's health and the other his face. When the face meter fills, upgrades are unlocked such as health regeneration, improved combat abilities and reduced equipment costs. The HUD also displays the weapon carried and its ammunition count.

The game features the option to choose from Triad, Face and Police XPs. Triad XP is obtained through melee combat and violent actions such as "environmental kills". Triad XP awarded is directly proportional to the complexity of attacking moves. Face XP, obtained in civilian side missions, fills Shen's face meter and unlocks cosmetic items such as clothes and vehicles. By reaching a higher Face level, the player can freely buy vehicles or clothing. When it is full, Shen gains health regeneration, increased attack damage and other benefits. Police XP is gained by minimizing civilian casualties and property damage in missions and by completing police side missions. Gaining XP unlocks abilities such as hot-wiring cars and disarming opponents. The clothes, accessories and vehicles purchased by Shen affect non-player characters' reactions toward him. The player may collect jade statues used to unlock melee combat skills.

Sleeping Dogs' melee combat has been compared to that of Batman: Arkham Asylum: it allows the player to fight opponents coming from any direction with attack, grapple and counter-moves and can be performed with or without weapons. These three basic commands are chained together with the character's movement to execute attacks. The player's face meter fills up faster when enemies are defeated with different moves in rapid succession or with environmental attacks. Environmental attacks are performed by dragging enemies to certain objects, which Shen uses to eliminate opponents. Melee weapons such as knives and tyre irons are available, but they break with extended use. The player can perform "action hijacks" while driving vehicles. These cause Shen to leap from his vehicle to steal another in motion. In combat, Shen loses health as he takes damage. This can be mitigated by taking cover where available. If the health bar is depleted, the character will respawn at a hospital. Health can also be restored by ordering food or drinks from various stalls and vending machines, which also provides a variety of buffs to Shen, such as health regeneration or improved damage.

If the player directs Shen to commit crimes, police response is indicated by a "heat" meter on the HUD. The meter displays the current wanted level; if it reaches 5, the police will aggressively pursue Shen. The meter recedes when Shen is hidden from the cops' line of sight. Police officers continue to search for Shen even if he leaves the wanted vicinity, and they will resume the chase if he is sighted. If Shen is arrested or killed by officers during missions, the player can restart from the last checkpoint.

Some areas in the world remain inaccessible until milestones in the story are achieved. Although the player must complete missions to unlock content and continue the story, they may wander the game's open world and participate in activities such as visiting a karaoke bar, carjacking, street racing and joining a fight club. There are several potential girlfriends for Shen: successfully dating them awards collectibles and bonus content. The completion of side missions rewards the player with new missions, vehicles, and outfits, among other things.

The game has no multiplayer component, but online leaderboards are available for players to compare scores. Many activities that are not central to the story grant Stat Awards in three tiers: bronze, silver and gold. These unlock achievements and trophies.

As the game progresses, the player acquires various safe houses to save progress in, but at certain times is required to go there to progress further. Like other houses, the player can survey unlocked areas, change outfits, and a parking garage is accessible in which they can use unlocked vehicles.

## Synopsis

### Setting and characters

Sleeping Dogs is set in a contemporary Hong Kong, which is split into four districts named after regions of the city. The game reveals the story of Wei Shen (Will Yun Lee), a former San Francisco police officer who was transferred to the Hong Kong Police Force and assigned the task to infiltrate and destroy a Triad organization known as the Sun On Yee (based on the Sun Yee On). The main storyline features two sub-plots: Shen's balance between completing his police mission whilst committing crimes to prove himself to the Triads, and missions assigned by a Triad lieutenant, including the assassinations of Triad members loyal to other lieutenants.

Shen's mission is coordinated by Police Superintendent Thomas Pendrew (Tom Wilkinson), and progress made by Shen is reported to his handler, Raymond Mak (Byron Mann). Shen infiltrates the Sun On Yee via his childhood friend Jackie Ma (Edison Chen), a low-level Triad member; and his loyalty is tested by the Triad boss Winston Chu (Parry Shen). Other characters in the game include the head of the Sun On Yee, David Wai-Lin "Uncle" Po (James Hong); fellow Triad bosses "Broken Nose" Jiang (Elizabeth Sung) and Henry "Big Smile" Lee (Tzi Ma); Shen's love interest Amanda Cartwright (Emma Stone); Winston's right-hand man, Conroy Wu (Robin Shou); singer Vivienne Lu (Lucy Liu); and Shen's girlfriend Not Ping (Celina Jade).

### Plot

Wei Shen is a petty criminal who is arrested in Aberdeen, Hong Kong after a drug deal goes wrong. In prison, Shen meets an old friend Jackie Ma, who offers to introduce Shen to the members of a gang once they are released. It is revealed that Shen is an undercover cop whose arrest was part of a police operation, headed by SP Thomas Pendrew and Inspector Raymond Mak, to infiltrate the Water Street branch of a Triad organization named "Sun On Yee". Shen joins the gang and is sent on various jobs and assignments by their leader Winston Chu against a rival Triad branch known as the Jade Gang led by Sam "Dogeyes" Lin. Shen is assigned to arrest Popstar, a drug supplier for the Triad.

After Popstar's arrest, the Water Street branch suspect that Shen is a cop, though he manages to make Winston relent. To prove he is not a cop, the Water Street boys send Shen to kill Siu Wah, one of Dogeyes' drug dealers, but Shen instead brings him in alive. Gaining Winston's trust, he lets Shen take over his position if something happens to him. Retaliatory attacks on each other's properties culminate in the killing of Winston and his fiancée at their wedding by men posing as members of the rival 18K Triad. The leader of the Sun On Yee David Wa-Lin "Uncle" Po, is critically wounded in the attack, but is saved by Shen. As a reward, Shen is promoted to "Red Pole" of the Sun On Yee and he takes over Winston's position in the Water Street branch. He hunts down Winston's killer who reveals that Dogeyes instigated the attack.

Shen captures Dogeyes who is killed by Winston's mother. Po dies in the hospital. As a branch leader, Shen becomes embroiled in a power struggle over the leadership of Sun On Yee, siding with "Broken Nose" Jiang against another branch leader, Henry "Big Smile" Lee. After Po's funeral, during which they are attacked by 18K members, Lee reluctantly agrees to an election that will decide the leader of the Sun On Yee, but promises retaliation if he does not win. Shen refuses Pendrew's order to get off the case out of fear of Lee taking over. Lee orders attacks against other Sun On Yee branches in an attempt to eliminate the competition and intimidate them into voting for him, including kidnapping Jackie and handing him to the 18K as a way to get rid of Shen. Just before the election, Shen receives a text message from Jackie to meet him, but he finds Jackie hanged and disemboweled on a pipe in an alleyway.

Shen is knocked out and wakes up, greeted by Liu Shen Tong, a feared Triad enforcer who knows Shen is a cop. Shen is tortured, but manages to escape and kills Tong. He then proceeds to assault Lee's compound, reaching Lee, who reveals to Shen that Pendrew sold him out. The two fight and Shen kills Lee, ending the long and violent civil war and allowing Jiang to become the chairwoman of the Sun On Yee. With the deaths of many senior ranking gang members, Shen is commended on his work but is informed by Mak that Pendrew has been promoted to Interpol and is out of his reach. Shen receives video evidence from Jiang showing that Pendrew killed Uncle Po by injecting lethal chemicals into his IV. After leaking the footage, Shen is able to incriminate Pendrew and returns to work on the police force. Jiang watches Shen from afar and orders the remaining Sun On Yee members to leave him alone, due to his loyalty to her.

## Development

Towards the end of 2007, Activision approached the newly founded United Front Games, which consisted of ten people, to develop an open world game. United Front accepted and Activision provided sufficient funding for 180 employees. Early designs for the game, named Black Lotus at the time, incorporated dark tones with elements of humour similar to an "HBO crime drama". The project advanced to full production in early 2008.

A year into development, Activision proposed that Black Lotus be made part of an existing franchise and highlighted similarities to the True Crime series; both games were set in open worlds with plots centred on an undercover cop in a criminal organization. Sales of previous True Crime games had been disappointing, but Activision felt the innovations in Black Lotus could revitalize the franchise and make the game successful in its own right. Activision attached the game to the series and revealed it to the public as True Crime: Hong Kong in November 2009. They delayed the game until 2010 to allow further refinement.

Despite progress in game development, at the release of the financial report for the last quarter of 2010 on February 9, 2011, Activision announced the cancelation of True Crime: Hong Kong. The publisher said that due to "quality issues" further investment would not make the game competitive in the genre even with their most optimistic projections. Although United Front Games shared this sentiment, executive producer Stephen Van Der Mescht expressed in an interview that "True Crime: Hong Kong was playable from start to finish and virtually complete in terms of content" prior to Activision's cancellation of the project. Van Der Mescht said the game "stood apart" from the competition.

On June 22, 2011, Activision CEO Eric Hirshberg explained that the budget and development delays were contributing factors in its cancellation. According to Hirshberg, the increase in budget and subsequent delays meant that the game would have to be "pretty incredible success" for Activision to have an acceptable return on investment. Due to competition posed by other titles, particularly Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, Activision's view was that True Crime: Hong Kong was not at the level of quality that it could compete.

United Front Games cut 120 staff with the company's solvency in doubt until August when Square Enix acquired the publishing rights to the game. Square Enix did not buy the True Crime intellectual property, and renamed the game Sleeping Dogs. Square Enix London Studios general manager Lee Singleton said he recognized the game's playability and potential. United Front Games' President Stefan Wessels stated he was excited to work with Square Enix London Studios. Sixty people were added to the development team and the game was released on August 14, 2012.

### Design

During development of the game the combat system was one of the key focuses. Mike Skupa, the design director, said that the combat was refined using feedback from Square Enix, with references drawn from Tony Jaa's The Protector. The system was designed to emphasize multi-directional combat, strike-based gameplay and environmental interaction. It started as "one big violent sandbox" and progressed to a playable demo. Skupa was pleased with how well the game kept the qualities of the original demo.

The game's designers performed extensive research in Hong Kong to create an accurate portrayal of the city. Art designers spent seven days in Hong Kong, where they studied the city's environment, and took more than 20,000 photos as references for the physical environment in the game. They traveled on foot to various locales, such as clubs and malls, and interviewed ex-Triad members and retired members of the Hong Kong Police Force Anti-Triad unit, which inspired narratives and character design. The sound designers spent ten days in the city overseeing the dialogue sessions on weekdays and capturing ambient noises around the city at weekends.

During the early stages of development, in-game dialogue was recorded in Los Angeles by local Asian actors, but much of the audio was re-recorded in Hong Kong through Drum Music, a specialist recording company. Audio design was complicated; scripting was handled in Vancouver and the recording was in Hong Kong. There were reservations among the developers about the language for the background dialogue; the sound design team eventually prevailed in using Hong Kong Cantonese over English.

In-game radio music was handled by Joe Best and sourced from various music labels. Tracks were licensed from Tsunami Music, Warp, Ninja Tune, and Roadrunner Records which lent their names to the in-game radio stations. Through Tsunami Music, voice actors were auditioned and recruited to provide presenters for each of the radio stations in the game. DJs from companies such as Kerrang! also provided voices for the in-game radio presenters. Nathan Wang composed original Chinese songs in the style of Cantopop and Mandopop songs.

## Marketing and release

United Front Games relied on viral marketing, such as Internet advertisements and TV trailers, prior to Sleeping Dogs's release. The production team promoted the game with regular communication on social networking websites. They promoted it at video game conventions such as Game Developers Conference, PAX East, MCM London Comic Con, E3, Comic Con, and Gamescom.

Square Enix revealed North American pre-order bonuses for Best Buy, GameStop and Amazon customers in April 2012; each retailer offered its own exclusive in-game content pack. A United Kingdom limited edition release contained two such packs, and an Australian special edition, sold through EB Games and JB Hi-Fi, included all three packs at no added cost.

Further marketing of Sleeping Dogs was via cross-promotion on different platforms; players who bought the game through Steam received an eight item pack for Team Fortress 2, which was later made available for separate purchase, and a Hong Kong-themed Team Fortress 2 level, Kong King. Owners of Just Cause 2 on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, or PC received automatic access to a Sleeping Dogs character outfit in the style of Just Cause 2 protagonist Rico Rodriguez. The outfit increases the player's action hijack statistics and increases the range from which the player can perform stunt takeovers of enemy vehicles.

The game was released on August 14, 2012, in North America, August 16 in Australia, and August 17 in Europe. The September 27 Japanese release was titled Sleeping Dogs: Hong Kong Secret Police (スリーピングドッグス 香港秘密警察) and was censored to pass the classification by the Japanese ratings board CERO. Differences include penalties for attacking civilians, lack of a street race flagger and a less explicit sex scene.

An enhanced version, subtitled Definitive Edition, was released on October 10, 2014, for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It includes all the 24 previously released downloadable content (DLC) and features improved graphical resolution and gameplay, setting and audiovisual quality changes based on community feedback.

## Downloadable content

`Square Enix announced six months of downloadable content to follow the game's release. Packs included content such as outfit items, vehicles, experience point boosts, tasks including money hidden around the city for players to find, vehicle races, weapons, missions and fight movesets. Square Enix released a total of five content packs along with various pre-order bonuses, such as the Dragon Master Pack which was released in November 2012. The last downloadable content for Sleeping Dogs was the "Wheels of Fury" supercar expansion, released in February 2013.`

The first story-driven game expansion, Nightmare in North Point, was released in October 2012. Its theme is based on Chinese horror and folklore, and features Chinese vampires known as the jiangshi. In the expansion's plot, Shen's girlfriend is abducted by the ghost of Smiley Cat, a former gangster killed by Uncle Po, who has risen up from the underworld as a ghost to take his vengeance on the Sun On Yee. Shen fights Smiley Cat's army of jiangshi, Yaoguai and possessed gangsters, as well as the ghosts of Dogeyes, Johnny Ratface and Ponytail, who reveals that Wei can defeat Smiley Cat by burning the last remnant of his original body. After incinerating his little finger, Cat returns to the underworld and Shen's girlfriend is freed. As Shen and his girlfriend walk away in relief, the latter turns her head to the camera and smiles as her eyes glow in a freeze frame shot.

The second story-based expansion, Zodiac Tournament, was released in December 2012. The expansion adds an island to the game, with fight arenas, enemies, bosses and outfits. Inspector Teng asks Shen to investigate an illegal fighting tournament held away from Hong Kong. After defeating several fighters in lethal matches, Shen wins and pursues the Tournament Master, who offers to share his earnings in return for his life. Shen declines his offer and snaps the master's neck, killing him.

The third and final story-based expansion, Year of the Snake, was released in March 2013. It adds six missions set after the game's story. The additional missions feature Shen investigating terror attacks around Hong Kong stemming from a cultist group who believe that they will achieve spiritual salvation through the cleansing of Hong Kong residents. Shen must sabotage the cult's activities, ultimately ending in the arrest of the cult master. The DLC adds the ability for Shen to tase and arrest civilians and criminals around Hong Kong, as well as additional collectibles, side missions, ownable police vehicles, and new clothing.

## Reception

### Critical reception

Sleeping Dogs received "generally favorable" reviews from critics, according to review aggregator Metacritic. It was nominated for "Action Game of the Year" and "Outstanding Achievement in Story" at the 2013 D.I.C.E. Interactive Achievement Awards.

Eurogamer writer Dan Whitehead called the combat system "robust and intuitive". IGN's Colin Moriarty compared the combat to that of Batman: Arkham City and compared it favorably with Grand Theft Auto IV despite its simplicity and repetitiveness. Hollander Cooper from GamesRadar praised the combat, especially the unique melee attacks. Andy Kelly of Computer and Video Games welcomed the slower-paced missions. Carolyn Petit from GameSpot and Ben Wilson from PlayStation Official Magazine found the combat enjoyable and highlighted the environmental attacks as "empowering and effective". Cooper, Allistair Pinsof from Destructoid, and Edge found the missions generic and linear, a sentiment reserved by Dan Ryckert of Game Informer for the shooting missions. Petit disagreed, saying that the missions were varied and enjoyable. Whitehead and Ryckert complained that there is too little to spend mission earnings on.

The leveling system was described by Ryckert as "stand[ing] out from the open-world pack". Moriarty praised the system for its use of the Face system and the ability to replay missions if unsatisfied. Petit agreed and enjoyed the "pleasant sense of growth" given to Shen by the experience system during the campaign. Pinsof called the system "one of the greatest innovations Sleeping Dogs brings to the genre". Jon Blyth of Official Xbox Magazine liked the "pleasingly absurd" missions needed to gain Face.

Moriarty lauded the game's depiction of Hong Kong as "alive and well-populated" and liked the AI, the setting, and the voice acting, in particular the use of Cantonese and English. Edge gave similar praise: "Offering a view of Asia through the filter of its action film industry, this is a depiction of Hong Kong that could have come straight from the reel." Pinsof acclaimed the city's scale and AI.

Shen and the other characters were mostly well received. Cooper applauded the conflicted nature of Shen's personality as a result of being in an overwhelming situation, arguing that this detail solidified him as a developed and likable protagonist. Cooper found the Triad members unsatisfactory by comparison, comparing them unfavorably with Grand Theft Auto characters. Edge called Shen an engaging protagonist and complimented the other characters, whose voice actors brought life to the characters. Blyth described the cast, aside from Shen, as "brilliantly recognizable stereotypes that have been given enough extra edge for you to care about them", and felt the attitude shifts of some characters were distracting and unrealistic. Wilson said that the characters were "fleshed out brilliantly". Pinsof claimed that the game's premise "grants a perfect excuse for Shen to do terrible things while remaining a sympathetic, level-headed lead." Kelly thought Shen's two-faced nature was the main entertainment factor of the missions. Whitehead found the player's ability to switch allegiances as needed to wear away at "the already fragile grasp the narrative has on Shen's conflicted loyalties."

Moriarty criticized the game's draw distance and texture loading and Whitehead noted some framerate and environmental glitches. Petit said that, in spite of generally convincing non-player character design, "character models look like plastic dolls when viewed up close, and some gestures characters make are rigid and unnatural." Edge stated that character animations in a variety of contexts look "robotic", and Kelly said that "everything in the distance looks like it's been smeared in Vaseline." Pinsof described the graphics as "gorgeous" and conducive to an immersive experience in Hong Kong. Moriarty noted that the game's camera was particularly problematic when driving and less so during combat. Cooper and Edge also criticized the camera.

### Sales

In the UK, Sleeping Dogs was the best-selling game in the week of its release, and had the fifth-highest first-week sales of any game released in 2012. It retained the top spot during its second week, despite sales dropping by 15%. It returned to the top spot after four weeks on sale. Sleeping Dogs sales rose by 8%, despite five weeks in the chart, defeating new release Tekken Tag Tournament 2. Sleeping Dogs was the 20th-best-selling title of 2012 in the UK and the best-selling original game. According to NPD Group, Sleeping Dogs was the sixth-best-selling game in the US in August 2012 at 172,000 copies. PC sales for Sleeping Dogs were not counted, as it is only available by download in the US.

According to Square Enix, Sleeping Dogs had sold 1.5 million copies by the end of September 2012. Square Enix president Yoichi Wada defended the game's sales and said that the firm might have had unreasonably high expectations for the game. He saw Sleeping Dogs as a strong new intellectual property and said that titles such as Sleeping Dogs tend to sell better over long periods of time in the West, unlike in Japan where most lifetime sales are achieved in the first months. On March 26, 2013, Square Enix announced that the game was expected to sell about 1.75 million copies in 2013. On September 10, 2013, the company announced that Sleeping Dogs, alongside Tomb Raider and Hitman: Absolution, had been successful in their game development, but did not meet sales expectations, and were considered by the publisher "failures".

## In other media

### Canceled sequel

In early 2013, United Front was working on a sequel to Sleeping Dogs. The game would have picked up after the original game, once again following the exploits of Wei Shen. He would be joined by a "conflicted, corrupt partner" named Henry Fang, as they explored China's Pearl River Delta. The player would have the ability to arrest any NPC in the world, and influence a branching storyline that swapped between both Shen and Fang. The game was said to be United Front's most ambitious game, which would have included a second screen app for mobile devices that would be able to interact with the world of the game; playing as inspector Jane Teng, the player would "manage the police force and try to control territories" from a mobile device, with the choices made in the game affecting gameplay in Sleeping Dogs 2. The mobile game could be played on its own, with the hope being the free-to-play game would point players towards the console game. Plans for the sequel were eventually scrapped in late 2013 before the project went into production.

### Canceled spin-off

Triad Wars is a canceled spin-off to Sleeping Dogs, which was scheduled to be released in 2015. The game was initially planned to be released as a PC online game with more massively multiplayer online (MMO) elements, with the central goal being to "rise to power as a criminal kingpin of the Triad underworld". It featured the same map as the original Sleeping Dogs.

In October 2013, United Front Games confirmed that a game, titled Triad Wars, set within Sleeping Dogs' universe was in production. The developer confirmed that it would be published by Square Enix, and would be shown to the public in 2014. Triad Wars was described by the developers as "something we've wanted to do for ages but just never had the chance. But now we do." United Front Games teased that Triad Wars would be a PC online game on September 19, 2014. An announcement trailer premiered on September 22, 2014. In early 2015, the game entered its beta-testing stage. It was announced in December 2015 that the game would be shutting down. Developer United Front Games announced the closure on Twitter and the Triad Wars forums. The developers published a statement saying "We've loved seeing how you've played Triad Wars but we know it wasn't right for many of you."

### Film adaptation

In March 2017, a live action film adaptation of the game was announced. It is being produced by Neal Moritz, with Donnie Yen starring as Wei Shen. A release date for the film has yet to be announced. In February 2018 Yen stated on various social media accounts that the film was in production.

## See also

- List of Square Enix video game franchises

2012 video game


The 3rd Birthday

The 3rd Birthday (Japanese: ザ・サード バースデイ, Hepburn: Za Sādo Bāsudei) is a role-playing shooter developed by HexaDrive and published by Square Enix for the PlayStation Portable. It was released in Japan in 2010 and in North America and Europe in 2011. The game is the third entry in the Parasite Eve video game series, based on the titular Japanese novel, and a spin-off, having only a loose connection to events from past games. The game features a third-person shooter-based combat system with role-playing mechanics. A key mechanic is the Overdive ability, which allows the player to possess pre-positioned human allies and inflict damage upon enemies.

The game takes place in 2013, a year after creatures known as the Twisted have appeared from beneath Manhattan and decimated the city. To fight back against the Twisted, an investigatory team called the Counter Twisted Investigation (CTI) is formed. Among their number is series protagonist Aya Brea, who was found unconscious and suffering amnesia two years before the game's events. Using her Overdive ability, Aya travels into the past to alter the outcome of battles against the Twisted. At the same time, Aya attempts to find out the origin of the Twisted and regain her memories.

The 3rd Birthday was created as a conceptual rebirth for Aya's character, as well as a means of re-introducing her to the gaming community, with it being over a decade since the last game in the series. Among the staff were Hajime Tabata, Yoshinori Kitase, Motomu Toriyama, Isamu Kamikokuryo, and Aya's original designer Tetsuya Nomura. Originally announced as an episodic title for mobile phones, the game was later changed into a PSP exclusive. Upon release, the game reached sixth place in Japanese sales charts, and was among the top five games in North American and UK sales charts during its opening months.

Reviews have been mixed; critics praised the presentation and several parts of the gameplay, while opinions were mixed about the story, and many cited difficulties with camera control and some of the shooter mechanics.

## Gameplay

The 3rd Birthday is a third-person role-playing shooter. The player controls series protagonist Aya Brea through rendered-to-scale environments in from a third-person perspective. The game plays out as a series of missions, between which Aya rests at the Counter Twisted Investigation headquarters, which acts as the game's main hub. In the hub, Aya can receive briefings for missions, view additional documents, buy and customize new weapons. She also has the option to transport back there should she die during a mission. The game can be saved both at the hub and in safe zones within missions. At the end of each mission, Aya is given a grade based on performance, enemies killed, and the number of times she died. Depending on her score, she will earn differing amounts of Bounty Points, a currency used to customize weapons and repair protective gear in the hub area.

During missions, players navigate a series of linear linked areas fighting off multiple enemies. Items can be picked up during missions, such as grenades and medical kits. Aya has access to multiple guns for use in combat, including handguns, assault rifles and shotguns. By holding down a button on the controller, Aya automatically aims at an enemy and can fire at will. Taking cover behind objects or shields, or standing idle outside of battle, allows Aya to regenerate health. While in combat, an energy meter is charged and can be activated when full. When activated, Aya enters "Liberation Mode", a state enabling her to move around the battlefield at high speed for a short period of time.

In most battle situations, Aya is accompanied by a group of allied NPC (non-playable character) soldiers that the player can direct around the battle area. Available commands include offering supporting fire, directly attacking enemies, or staying behind cover. They can also all fire at the same enemy in certain situations, dealing high damage. Each NPC has a separate health meter, and is permanently removed from battle upon defeat. Central to combat is Overdive, an ability which enables Aya to transmit herself between bodies. If her health is low, Aya can transport herself into the body of an allied NPC, taking on their health level, position and current weapon in the process. NPCs not controlled by Aya are controlled by the game's AI. Aya can remain in a body for the duration of a level, or until the unit has died. If Aya cannot jump to another body, she dies and the level must either be restarted or exited. Overdive can be activated at any time, enabling Aya to transport around the battlefield to avoid enemy attacks or save herself when her current unit's health is low. Overdive can also be used to attack enemies if Aya maintains a sustained assault. After a time, a triangle icon appears on enemies, allowing her to perform an Overdive attack, dealing high damage to the targeted enemy.

During combat, Aya gains experience points and gains experience levels when a certain quantity is achieved. Gaining a level both restores her health and raises her maximum health and energy levels. Weapons also gain levels the more they are used. In addition to leveling up, Aya's stats can be customized using Over Energy (OE) clips found during missions or acquired during Overdive attacks. Using a 3x3 grid accessed in the hub area, certain OE clips grant different stat boosts and abilities. Creating a new grid automatically deletes the effects of the original.

## Plot

The game's story plays out in episodes, similar to a television series, with many events told out of sequence. On Christmas Eve of 2012, monstrous creatures dubbed as "Babels" appear in New York City. Along with lifeforms spawned by them called the Twisted, they lay waste to the city and consume any human in their path. By the following year, an investigatory team known as the CTI (Counter Twisted Investigation) has been formed. One of the CTI members is Aya Brea, who was found outside St. Thomson's Cathedral in 2010, just before the Babels and Twisted began appearing. Dr. Hyde Bohr, Chief of the CTI, finds that Aya is suffering from amnesia, and that her personality has changed. After taking Aya in, the CTI discovered that she was capable of transferring her soul from body to body independent of time, an ability dubbed "Overdive", which enables her to fight the Twisted.

Bohr and the others planned to use this unique ability to travel back through time and prevent the disaster, developing a machine called "Overdive System" to allow Aya to travel into the past and change events. As she embarks on each mission, she is confronted by powerful, sentient Twisted born from corrupted humans, later dubbed High Ones. One such High One is Kyle Madigan, a man she met and fell in love with during Parasite Eve II. As she defeats each High One, she regains pieces of her memory, most prominently her memories of being engaged to Kyle, and the existence of Eve Brea, her adopted sister. After an incident that saw the CTI HQ and the Overdive device destroyed by the Kyle High One, Aya reunites with Kunihiko Maeda, a man who aided her in Parasite Eve, to resolve the entire mystery behind the appearance of the Babel, Twisted and High Ones. Aya eventually discovers that Bohr is himself a High One. Bohr masterminded the death of other High Ones in order to form the Grand Babel, which functions like a giant Overdive system. Bohr seeks to dive back in the past to Time Zero, the point where events were set in motion, to fulfill his plan for the survival of his own species from a time war cycle between humans, the Twisted, and the High Ones. Aya battles Bohr and is pulled with him into Time Zero, where she discovers the truth.

In 2010 at St. Thomson's Cathedral, Aya and Kyle were going to be married. The Cathedral was attacked by a SWAT team and Aya was killed. Eve attempted to save Aya by sending her consciousness into Aya's body, creating the Overdive ability. The event caused Aya's consciousness to separate from her body and fragment through time to create the Twisted, Eve's consciousness became trapped in Aya's body while parts of Eve's body were transplanted into the people close to them creating the High Ones. The "Aya" of the main story is in fact Eve in Aya's body. After these revelations, Eve returns to her body and is asked by Bohr to assimilate him and trigger the birth of a new species. Eve refuses, and when Bohr tries to force the process, a reborn Aya shoots him to death. Aya then reveals that to avert the birth of the Twisted and High Ones, the sources (Aya and Eve) must be removed. Expressing her regret of not being able to marry Kyle, she tells Eve to shoot her. In a fit of emotion, Eve switches bodies with Aya before shooting her, creating a new timeline where Eve's body and Aya's consciousness do not exist, erasing the game's events. Though Eve offers to marry Kyle, he refuses and hints that he is going to find Aya. In a post-credits sequence four years after the game's events, Eve is walking the streets of New York and is wished a "Happy Fourth Birthday" by a woman resembling Aya.

## Development

Concepts for a third installment in the Parasite Eve video game series had been around for some time. As work was being finished on Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, Nomura voiced his wish to create a new game for the character Aya Brea, and this time it was taken up. Despite the story of Parasite Eve II not leaving many avenues for a sequel, the development team wanted to take advantage of advancing gaming technology and popularity by creating a mature gaming experience that would re-introduce Aya to players around the world. The main staff consisted of director Hajime Tabata, producer Yoshinori Kitase, creative producer and character designer Tetsuya Nomura, art director Isamu Kamikokuryo, scenario director Motomu Toriyama, and main writer Toshimitsu Takeuchi. Nomura requested Tabata as the two had worked well together on previous projects, and Nomura was busy with other projects despite his strong interest. The 3rd Birthday was originally announced in May 2007 as an episodic mobile game developed by Square Enix for Japan's FOMA mobile service. In 2008, during a special Square Enix event, the game was announced to have changed to a game for the PlayStation Portable. Part of the reason, as stated by Nomura, was that the desired level of realism was not possible on mobile phones. The game became exclusive to PSP as Tabata wanted to make full usage of the platform's hardware capabilities, along with it being a gaming platform available worldwide. Tabata and his team worked on The 3rd Birthday at the same time as fellow mobile-turned-PSP title Final Fantasy Type-0. Square Enix requested Tabata to concentrate on finishing The 3rd Birthday, leading to Type-0 almost being cancelled.

The final version of the game was co-developed by Square Enix and HexaDrive, a company created by former Capcom staff members. As the new form of The 3rd Birthday had transformed into a third-person shooter, Square Enix wanted staff members with experience at developing such games, and then-company CEO Yoichi Wada recommended HexaDrive to Tabata. As multiple HexaDrive staff members had also worked on fellow shooter Lost Planet: Extreme Condition, Tabata agreed to the collaboration. While aiming for a high quality product, the team designed the game as if for the PlayStation 3 home console, then worked to fit it onto the PSP. During development, the team sought creative help from the team developing Final Fantasy XIII for the visual design. The team had previously experimented with shooters with Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII, but this time they wanted to create something closer to a third-person shooter. The team was assembled by Tabata based on their development experience with action games. While working inside the control and hardware limitations of the title, the team created firearms and the lock-on mechanic as the fundamental attack action, instead of the free-roaming style of a standard third-person shooter. While designing levels to function with the game's Overdive system, the team considered what the level would hold, how often players would utilize the function, the difficulty of levels, and the positioning and strength of enemies. During development, a questionnaire was circulated around company staff concerning the character Aya, to find out which of the planned features were popular. One of those that survived in the final game was Aya's clothes being damaged when she was hit by an enemy. Nomura was among the first to suggest this feature originally, tying it with increased enemy difficulty to present a dilemma to players who "might purposely make her take damage just to see more of her body".

Nomura worked on the character designs for the main cast. He was originally only going to work on Aya and Eve, but after seeing the settings for the other characters, he offered to design them too. The team wanted to emphasize the character's sexuality. As part of this, the team included a scene where Aya takes a shower. This was inspired by a similar scene in Parasite Eve II. When the title was being developed for PSP, the team's main challenge with the character was to make her look as realistic as possible while retaining her established physical traits. Using this new realism, the team wanted to portray the fear felt by humans when faced with such threats through Aya. Achieving this realism proved one of the most difficult aspects of development. Her alternate costumes were not a high priority for the team, so their artists had high creative freedom.

While many of the concepts for the final version were present in the original mobile version, such as Overdive and the Twisted, the original story was scrapped when the game came to upgraded platforms. In creating the story for The 3rd Birthday, the team took inspiration from the 10-year gap in the character's in-game and real-time history. This meant that it would be difficult to create a straightforward sequel, so the team instead decided to make the game about Aya's return. Toriyama imagined story concepts such as the snowy New York setting and the image of a bloodstained wedding dress. These two concepts survived the platform upgrade. Over the course of the development, he adjusted the plot numerous times to be more adult-oriented and to include complex narrative twists. The original concept was to make the game feel like a television drama, with multiple cliffhangers and moments of high drama. The game was designed from the outset as having no direct connection to the previous Parasite Eve games. The game's title came from it being Aya's third video game appearance, as well as it being a noticeable change in setting. The game's logo was designed to both look like the letter "B" and the number "3". It was originally only going to represent the number, but Nomura added the extra lines to display the game's "multi-faceted" nature. A notable addition was the option to skip cutscenes, a feature the team regretted leaving out of Crisis Core.

## Music

The music for The 3rd Birthday was composed by Mitsuto Suzuki and Tsuyoshi Sekito, with additional work by original Parasite Eve composer Yoko Shimomura. Shimomura was involved from an early stage, when The 3rd Birthday was still a mobile game. When she was originally asked to compose for the title, she was involved with a number of other projects which made handling the entire score difficult. When asked whether she wanted to work with anyone on the composition, she suggested Suzuki and Sekito. The general instruction was to follow the pattern used by the music for Parasite Eve, with Suzuki and Sekito handling the majority of tracks, going so far as referring to the songs from the original Parasite Eve when handling remixes of old themes. In keeping with the game's other development goals, Shimomura wanted to alter some of the established music, although she asked the team to include familiar themes from earlier games for fans. Suzuki was responsible for a large amount of track mixing. Sekito was mostly involved with choosing and helping with instrumentation, in particular whether to include symphonic music. The composers had a relatively high degree of freedom, but they also had problems when composing some tracks that did not fit into selected scenes. Re-orchestrations of two pieces of classical music, "Sleepers Wake" by Johann Sebastian Bach, and "Joy to the World", a popular Christmas song, were used by Suzuki and Shimomura respectively to represent key moments and motifs within the game. The order of songs in the game was created to reflect the situation in a level. These variations were emphasized during mixing, while they also needed to adjust the mixing and track length based on the game as a whole. For the game's theme song, the company collaborated with Japanese rock band Superfly. The game's theme song Eyes on Me, described as a "standard love song", was specially composed by the band for the game. It was the band's first video game theme song. The game's soundtrack was released as an album by Square Enix on December 22, 2010. The 3rd Birthday Original Soundtrack contains 66 tracks across 3 discs and has a total length of 2:56:52.

## Reception

During production, Nomura and Tabata stated that the team were aiming to sell 500,000 copies of the game, a sales-goal based strategy they had previously used for Crisis Core. During its first week, The 3rd Birthday debuted at \#6 in Japanese gaming charts, selling 140,000 units. By the end of 2011, the game had sold 353,747 units in Japan. The game reached the top of the charts for PSP games in North America by the beginning of April 2011, overtaking fellow Square Enix title Dissidia 012: Final Fantasy and the PSP port of The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. Later that month, it had fallen to \#3 in US charts, remaining there into June of that year. In the UK during the same initial period, it reached \#3, tailing behind Dissidia 012 and Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars.

Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu praised the title's gameplay, calling Aya "deeply customizable", finding the Overdive system and its strategic elements exhilarating and saying that those undaunted by the high difficulty would find much enjoyment in repeated playthroughs. Jeremy Parish of 1UP.com called it "an interesting blend of RPG and shooter", praising the working of Overdive. Eurogamer's Kristan Reed was less enthusiastic, referring to the conflicts with the Twisted as "relentless and ultimately repetitive", finding the high difficulty off-putting and Aya's movement speed unsuited for battle. Game Informer's Annette Gonzalez enjoyed the control layout and gameplay, but cited difficulties with the camera. Carolyn Petit of GameSpot said that the game sometimes succeeded in creating tension, but that other battles were frustrating and the camera was difficult. IGN's Patrick Kolan was pleased with the effort put into the game, and generally praised the battle and later levels, despite several cases of repetition during the main campaign. Emily Gera of VideoGamer.com found the basic shooter gameplay repetitive, but felt that the gameplay was saved by the Overdive ability and the quality of fights.

Parish said the game looked "gorgeous" and the soundtrack "exceptional". Petit praised the CGI cutscenes and varied level environments, and said the score "shifts adeptly between haunting and thrilling to suit the action." Kolan generally called the game one of the best-looking entries on the platform, and praised the soundtrack, despite it being "a little ho-hum". Gonzalez also praised the cutscenes, while citing the environments as "[ranging] from detailed to drab".

Famitsu was less positive about the story, saying that the mix of different elements made it "a bit hard to follow." Parish positively noted connections to the second game, but found the later story developments either confusing or weak, and disliked the way returning supporting characters had been changed. Petit said that those who wanted a straightforward story would be disappointed, and positively noted its exploration of existence, identity, and memory. Her main criticism was with the dialogue, which she referred to as "stilted". Kolan also faulted the voice acting and localization, especially when compared to games such as Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together. Gonzalez cited the story as intriguing, with "plenty of plot twists". Parish and Petit were both highly critical of Aya's portrayal: Parish disliked both her outfit, which seemed to conform too much female stereotypes in video games, and the clothes-tearing mechanic, which seemed to be included merely to flaunt her sexuality. Petit shared many points of criticism with Parish, also noting that Aya's portrayal of "one-part action hero, one-part submissive sex object" was wrong for a lead character, and that Aya's in-combat vocals were not suited to the game's situations. Reed referred to Aya as "[a] sighing, whimpering lead character".

2010 video game

Video games featuring female protagonists