25
official statements, dated
37 lines quoted verbatim, each to the record we hold
The player above is the studio's own upload; nothing here is downloaded or re-hosted. Upload record · 「captured in-game」 statement
The Dated Record of Black Myth: Zhong Kui
Official statements, the 2026 in-engine reveal, and 1,300 years of Zhong Kui imagery. Every claim dated.
- Developer
- Game Science 游戏科学, Shenzhen
- Form
- Single-player ARPG, PC and major consoles (2025-08-20 · FAQ)
- Release date
- None published Not found Not found
Is there a Black Myth: Zhong Kui release date?
No. The game has no announced date or window yet, no Steam store page or appid (checked the same day), no NPPA domestic approval record across thirteen monthly lists from August 2025 to August 2026, and no ESRB or PEGI entry that returns a hit (failed probes, logged as probes). The studio's published position on timing is its own FAQ line «As soon as we can!», and its director was quoted by GamesRadar+ saying that he himself «absolutely has no idea» when it will arrive (source). What does exist is 25 dated official statements and three official videos, the longest being a 952-second gameplay trailer from 19 Aug 2026.
34
days since the last official statement
last: 20 Aug 2026, 25 official statements in the ledger
25
press and trade reports
never allowed to stand in for a studio statement
12
negatives published
8 searches that found nothing, 4 claims turned back
50
public-domain images, local
from 17 institutions, 63 catalogued
51
classical passages quoted
35 works, 7 strata from 先秦 to 清, each with its captured edition
Engine I
The evidence hub
A pre-launch game is a set of claims, and most of them are somebody else's. The hub holds 53 entries on one screen, filterable by year, actor, grade and topic, with the quoted words kept beside the date and the link that produced them. It also holds the things that are not there: no appid, no rating record, no approval line, no engine named by anyone official. When a rumour is contradicted it is marked Denied Denied rather than deleted, so the correction stays auditable.
Ledger · Release-date dossier · Shot-by-shot reveal
Engine II
The Zhong Kui tradition
The title has a thousand years of paperwork behind it, and none of it belongs to a game company. A Tang minister thanks the emperor for a painted Zhong Kui and a new calendar; a Song catalogue of the imperial collection concedes that the origin «cannot be verified»; a Ming scholar derives the demon-queller from a ritual club; a Qing antiquary assembles four proofs for the same reading. This engine presents the quotations, the paintings and the ritual calendar, each with its holding record.
Lore texts · Gallery · Method
Release
Every date claim, ranked by who said it.
Reveal
55 marks across 19 Aug 2026, with 11 declined.
Gallery
50 plates across 7 eras, 17 collections.
Method
How a grade is assigned, and how it is taken away.
The handscroll of the record so far
Five knots in a thread that runs from a 116-second teaser to a thirteen-month silence. Read it left to right; the full version carries every dated statement.
-
19 Aug 2025
A 116-second teaser appears
Uploaded to the studio's own YouTube channel at 13:01 Pacific. The Chinese-dub cut is the primary upload.
source -
2025-08-20
Announced with a FAQ, not a date
Nine official FAQ answers go up. On timing the answer is "As soon as we can!", and the director is quoted as having no idea.
source -
2026-02-09
A 407-second New Year special
In-engine, and explicitly labelled by the studio as non-canon entertainment.
source -
2026-08-19
Fifteen minutes of combat, 952 seconds
The reveal upload. The studio states all of it was captured in-game from a work-in-progress build at 21:9.
source -
2026-09-23
This archive is assembled
53 statements graded, 8 of them records of things we could not find.
source
A thousand years of the same face
Rubbings, handscrolls, woodcut almanacs and Edo prints, all public domain, all downloaded and served from this site with the record page they came from. Drag sideways; each plate carries its institution and its attribution certainty, which is often «attributed» rather than «by».
Why the blanks are on purpose
A site about a game that does not exist yet has two ways to look substantial: inflate what has been said, or invent a frame around it. Both are quick and both are worthless to a reader who is trying to decide what is real. So the rules here are mechanical rather than rhetorical.
- I
An official statement is only what the studio published. gamesci.cn and the studio's own YouTube channel qualify; a trade article paraphrasing a founder does not, and is filed one tier down even when the quote inside it is genuine.
- II
Nothing is rendered without a source pointer. Every figure on this site is computed at build time from the same JSON that feeds the ledger, and each row names the archived record behind it. If a number has no row, the component prints nothing at all.
- III
A failed search is a finding. «No Steam appid located» and «the ESRB lookup returned 404» are published as records with their own dates, because next month one of them will stop being true and the change needs a baseline.
- IV
Seeing is not knowing. In the shot-by-shot reveal, a frame that shows a figure with a sword is graded 目见 (observed); that the figure is the protagonist is 推 (inferred); that he is a young Zhong Kui is somebody else's reading and is filed as 三方称 (claimed) beside the article that said it.
- V
Attribution may be downgraded, never upgraded. A handscroll catalogued as «attributed to» a Tang master stays «attributed to» here, even when a blog calls it a masterpiece by that hand. The same discipline runs backwards through the tradition: the dream of Emperor Xuanzong survives in a book that no longer exists, and the 12th-century imperial catalogue already said the origin «cannot be verified».
Compiled from 53 dated statements, 55 graded observations on one official video, 63 catalogued images of which 50 are shipped here, and 51 quoted classical passages. Corrections are welcome and travel faster if they arrive with a link: [email protected].
No claim on this site is older than its own source link.