Dear Pepe,

My name is Zheran Chen. I’m a Chinese automotive journalist living in the UK, and tonight I finally rediscovered a game I had spent almost 20 years trying to find: Tiger Hunt.

I played it around 2007 or 2008, when I was ten or eleven, on our family computer in our old home in China. I couldn’t read English and barely understood the controls or mission objectives. I only ever reached the fourth mission, so for almost twenty years I remembered it as a game about driving jeeps and trucks. Only tonight did I discover that it was actually a tank game. I had never got far enough to drive a tank.

There is one moment I have never forgotten. After somehow managing to get through the second mission, I reached a mission where I could drive a truck. I remember pulling out of a yard into bright, sunny countryside. After the earlier jeep missions, that change of vehicle and weather felt like discovering a whole new world. To my childhood eyes, it looked astonishingly real.

I also remember one particular evening. I was playing when my mum asked me to come and meet her at a beauty salon near our home. I left the computer running, went to wait for her, and then we went out for dinner. We may have had my favourite sweet-and-sour ribbonfish. I remember how the flesh slid cleanly off either side of the bone, and how I liked playing with the little skeleton afterwards.

When we came home, the computer was hot and its fan was running loudly. Tiger Hunt was still on the screen, on the fourth mission. My jeep had become stuck on the ground, and I couldn’t get it moving. For whatever reason, I never played the game again.

For years afterwards, I kept looking for it. I remembered the vehicles, the rain, the sunny truck mission and that stranded jeep, but I had no name to put to any of it. Tonight, I finally found it and watched the gameplay again.

Of course, I can see that the graphics have aged. But I still remember exactly how convincing that world felt when I first drove into it. Watching it now brought back much more than the game: our old home, my mum before she grew older, my dad before he became ill, and my uncle and grandmother, who were both still alive then. My biggest worries were getting up for school and my exam results.

I’m turning thirty next year. Yet tonight, all of that felt as close as yesterday.

I thought you might like to know that somewhere in Britain, a Chinese man ended up in tears over your game after a few Jack Daniel’s and Cokes. I doubt that was something anyone could have imagined while making it back in 2002.

Thank you, and everyone who worked on Tiger Hunt, for those first four missions. I only saw a small part of what you made, but I have carried it with me for nearly twenty years.

Best wishes, 

Zheran