You're racing down the wet-market streets of Wan Chai, semi-automatic on the passenger seat, police cars to the left, triad vehicles to the right. The crowded roads are hard to manoeuvre, and a pedestrian walks across your path - you swerve, the car flips, crashes and burns. You crawl out of the fiery wreck, gun in hand, ready for the duelling cops-and-robbers factions that are speeding towards you.
It's a scene out of any triad flick, a thousand cliches all rolled into an action-packed ball - except for one small difference: there's no 'you' in a movie.
This August sees the release of Sleeping Dogs, the first major game set entirely on the mean streets of Hong Kong. With video games regularly outselling movies and music releases, and the entire industry growing at a substantial rate, many pundits predict that Sleeping Dogs will be one of the largest promotional tools for our city in years.
'We've spent the past five years immersed in Hong Kong in one way or another,' says United Front Games senior producer, Jeff O'Connell. 'We've tried our best to represent what the city's all about, but also put a twist on it to make it fun for the gamer.'
The impetus for Sleeping Dogs began in late 2007, when the developer was tossing around ideas for an open-world game in the mould of the popular Grand Theft Auto series. Martin Scorsese's The Departed - a remake of Hong Kong action film Infernal Affairs - had just won best picture at the Oscars, and it got the ball rolling.
'The inspiration of undercover cop cinema got us excited, and when we started to look into Hong Kong, it ended up being an amazing place to set an open-world game,' says O'Connell. 'You've got natural boundaries because it's an island; you've got the good guys and bad guys in the history of cops versus triads; and there's the tradition of action cinema.'