You were supposed to have a fake marriage with the diva, so how did you become her father?

Zhao Yiming's test report came out on the third day.

The report was short, but the conclusion was concise: all mainstream configurations could run the game smoothly, with a stable frame rate above 60 FPS at 1080p resolution, and slight fluctuations at 4K resolution, but still within acceptable limits. He added a handwritten note at the end of the report: "The optimization of this game doesn't feel like a new project; it feels like a product that's been polished for several years. Just who is your outsourcing team?"

Lu Ran didn't reply to the note; he simply signed in the approval section.

The approval process in China went more smoothly than expected.

Lu Ran had previously spoken to the Ministry of Culture, and their feedback after seeing the game content was even more positive than his.

The staff member who came to handle the matter said in internal communication, "This direction is very correct." The process was fast, and the approval was issued in less than three days.

On the day of the official launch, Lu Ran didn't do any special promotion.

He instructed the operations department to post a short announcement on TUTU's homepage and gaming section, with the title "Bloody Battle in Shanghai".

The main text consists of only two paragraphs. The first paragraph states that this is a single-player shooting game with a historical background, and the second paragraph includes a download link and system requirements.

The reaction was lukewarm for the first two hours after the announcement was released.

The number of downloads is slowly increasing, and there are only a few comments in the comment section. Some people are asking, "What game is this? I've never heard of it before," and others are replying, "A single-player game made by CEO Lu should be pretty good."

Around 3 PM, a group of people started clearing the game, and the tone of the comments section began to change.

The first player to complete the game posted on the TUTU forum with the title "Completed in three hours, my hands were shaking".

The main text wasn't long, but one sentence topped the list of most popular comments: "When I finished level seven and saw that animation, I sat there stunned for several minutes. I'd never seen anything like it in a game before."

The post quickly garnered hundreds of replies.

Some people asked, "Which animation?" Others replied, "You'll find out when you reach level seven." Still others said, "I started to feel something was off when I reached level three; the street scene was just too realistic."

The post's popularity continued to climb, and by evening it had broken into the top ten of TUTU's overall trending list.

The media began following up the story the next day.

A gaming media outlet published its first review, titled "Not a fun game, but a game that makes you restless."

The article provides a detailed analysis of the game's art style and historical accuracy, mentioning details in the street scenes recreated from old photographs, and also researching the uniforms and weapon models of the Japanese soldiers.

The article concludes with a quote that has been widely shared: "This game isn't exploiting history; it's forcing you to remember it."

In the following days, walkthrough videos and live stream replays from various content creators began to appear intensively on several platforms.

When someone in the live stream reached the final level, they remained silent for over a minute. The chat was filled with comments asking, "What's wrong with the streamer?" The streamer paused the video before speaking, saying, "I'm looking for this historical information. I had no idea about these things before."

Some people even made a full-process story analysis video, piecing together the real historical events corresponding to each cutscene in the game into a complete narrative chain according to the timeline. The number of favorites for this video far exceeded the number of views.

Lu Ran goes through the comment data in the backend every day.

What he saw was that among tens of thousands of comments, there was almost no negative review. It wasn't because players didn't want to give negative reviews, but because there really wasn't anything to criticize.

The game itself is of high quality, and the content is so convincing that even the critics don't know where to begin their attacks.

On the seventh day, Lu Ran made the decision at the routine meeting to launch other servers simultaneously.

Chen Mo was sitting opposite him at the time. After listening, he only confirmed the operation process once: "The European server can just release it directly. As for the North American server, it's still in the debugging stage, and I'm worried that a surge in traffic might affect the stability of the existing game."

"Let's start with the EU server, and then launch on the North American server once it's finished with testing. The time difference should be kept within three days."

Chen Mo nodded and didn't press further. He had a rough idea of ​​what Lu Ran wanted to do, but he didn't ask.

Lu Ran didn't keep a close eye on the European server launch day.

He instructed the operations team to push out the launch announcement as usual and conduct two rounds of dynamic promotion according to the standard procedure.

The next morning, he checked the data in the backend and found that the download count was higher than expected.

What really caught Lu Ran's attention was the trend of discussion on several European gaming forums.

He came across a post by a German player who said he spent about five hours completing the game, and after finishing it, he looked up relevant English materials and then posted links to several Wikipedia and academic websites in the post.

He wrote at the end of his post: "My previous European history class touched on the Asian theater of World War II, but it was extremely brief. The scenes, the numbers, the details in this game are far more substantial than what I read in textbooks."

Someone replied with a link under that post, which led to a wider range of historical documents and war reports.

Some people even found old photos and news reports from the time preserved in online archives, took screenshots, and posted them in the thread for comparison.

The post evolved from a discussion about the game itself into a spontaneous historical data collection campaign.

A player from the UK wrote a long post on a forum.

He wasn't a history major, and the article's structure was messy, but he mentioned that he spent three days searching for related information after completing the game.

In his article, he said, "I used to think that World War II was just about Europe. Now I know I was wrong."

The feedback that impressed Lu Ran the most came from a French player.

After completing the game, he spent the entire night researching online and posted a long thread on the forum the next day.

The post listed links to original documents he found on various archives and library websites, including news reports from the time, war diaries of foreign journalists, and several investigative reports from international organizations.

He concluded by saying, "I felt angry as I searched. This information had always existed; I just never looked for it myself."

This post was repeatedly forwarded, and the forum administrators highlighted and pinned it for over a month.

The North American server launch was delayed by a few days due to server scheduling issues.

However, North American players reacted more strongly than European players because that region has a high proportion of Chinese immigrants, and many players have elders who have experienced or heard about that period of history.

Lu Ran saw a long comment in the background. The poster said that after he finished the game, he talked to his grandmother on the phone for forty minutes. His grandmother rarely talked about the past, but she talked a lot on the phone that day.

Someone started a topic on the international version of TUTU called "I only found out yesterday", and the topic of discussion was "What historical details did you only learn after playing this game?"

The number of posts under the topic is growing rapidly, with players from Europe, North America, South America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia participating. Some people are posting study notes, some are drawing timeline charts, some are uploading their own recorded audio explanations, and some have compiled links to relevant historical documentaries into index posts.

The posts were in a variety of languages, with English being the most common, but also French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Arabic.

Players from different languages ​​would help each other translate key passages. Someone translated the English abstract of a rare document into several languages, and the replies below were all "thank you" and "saved".

Lu Ran had the operations department collect screenshots of those posts and comments and archive them. It wasn't for reporting or promotion; he simply felt these things should be preserved.

Players from different countries, after completing a game, would go back and look up historical records and ask themselves questions they had never asked before—he felt that this was what the game was really about.

Lu Ran never opened those documents a second time after they were saved in the folder.

But that folder was placed in an inconspicuous corner of his desktop, and every time he saw it, he would think of those players who stayed up all night searching for information on European and North American forums.

He sent Jiang Feng a message one Friday night, consisting of only one sentence: "Has anyone been discussing this on Japanese gaming forums lately?"

Jiang Feng replied with a "Yes," and then sent two links. The first one was a post on a Japanese gaming forum, with the title translated as "Are you all playing the currently popular Chinese single-player games?"

The thread contains discussions about the graphics and gameplay, as well as the storyline.

The second link is a short review written by a Japanese player, who said that after playing the game, he looked up some information and found that "the textbooks contain much less information than the game does."

Lu Ran clicked on the two links and read them before putting his phone on the table.

The night outside the window in Shanghai had completely darkened, and the lights of the office buildings in the distance formed a blurry band of light behind the outline of the elevated highway.

He then recalled what Jiang Feng had reported earlier—Japanese players had started discussing that period of history on their own.

They didn't need anyone to convince them; they simply played a game and made their own judgment.

Lu Ran remained seated in his office chair.

He knew that this move had come to a close.

The Chinese market has been successfully established, and public opinion in Europe and North America is naturally fermenting. People in Japan are also starting to look up information on their own.

He doesn't need to do anything else; the players will continue on their own.

If a game can help people remember history, then that game will undoubtedly be a significant chapter in the history of gaming.

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