Chapter 1: The Dorm Room Dream: Three Students and a Game That Almost Didn’t Launch

The glow of the laptop screen was the only light in the cramped dorm room, painting the faces of three 20-something students with the cold blue tint of code as the clock ticked past 2 a.m. on a freezing Shanghai winter night in 2011. On the desk, half-empty cups of instant noodle soup sat next to crumpled stacks of game design notes, a dented can of Red Bull, and a secondhand iPad whose screen was cracked down the middle from being dropped too many times during testing. This was the headquarters of what would one day become one of the most influential game studios on the planet: a 10-square-meter dorm room on the fourth floor of the graduate housing building at Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Xuhui campus, where Cai Haoyu, Liu Wei, and Luo Yuhao were putting the finishing touches on their first ever original game, *FlyMe2theMoon*. <!-- 纸书配图建议：2011年上海交大徐汇校区研究生宿舍老照片，或团队早期开发场景手绘插画 --> <!-- 电子版超链接：蔡浩宇2021年GameRes采访原文 https://www.gameres.com/837263.html -->

Cai, then a 24-year-old master’s student in computer science, was the de facto leader and lead programmer, his hair perpetually messy from running his hands through it while debugging. Liu Wei, 23, a first-year master’s student in the same department, handled business operations, marketing, and whatever other tasks no one else wanted to do, his desk covered in printed crowdfunding flyers and lists of game bloggers he planned to pitch. Luo Yuhao, also 23 and a first-year master’s student in electronic information and electrical engineering, was the sole artist, sound designer, and part-time playtester, his sketchbook filled with hundreds of drafts of the game’s moon-themed characters and levels. The three had first met during their undergraduate years at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, bonding over a shared obsession with Japanese anime and video games, especially the 2009 OVA series *Fly Me to the Moon*, a sci-fi romance about a NASA astronaut and a young woman who dreams of going to space. At the time, most of their peers were focused on landing stable jobs at state-owned enterprises or tech giants like Alibaba and Tencent, but the trio had a different goal: they wanted to make their own games, not build features for other companies’ products.

Before they started working on *FlyMe2theMoon*, the trio had spent a year taking on freelance Flash game projects for small companies, earning just enough to cover their tuition and living expenses. But every time they finished a project, the code, art, and IP belonged to the client, and they had nothing to show for their work except a small deposit in their bank account. “We realized that if we kept doing this, we’d be 30 years old and still have nothing of our own to call ours,” Cai said in a 2021 interview with the Chinese gaming media outlet GameRes. “We wanted to make something that was ours, that people would remember us for.” Their first big break came in mid-2011, when they earned 100,000 RMB (roughly $15,000 at the time) from a Flash game project for a children’s education company. They quit their freelance work the next day, pooled their savings, and set up a tiny “studio” in their dorm room, determined to build their first original game.

Their timing was both lucky and terrifying. In 2010, Apple had finally opened the Chinese App Store to individual developers, a move that almost no one in China’s gaming industry took seriously at the time. Most Chinese game companies were still focused on PC client games or feature phone games, which had far larger user bases. But the trio saw the potential of smartphones: the App