Hong Kong’s Celestial Picture launches an online game that is the first game application developed to promote for a Chinese-language movie.

My Kingdom Game, both in English and Chinese, can be played via the Celestial website or downloaded for free from Apple’s iTunes store.  Available from today, it has been developed by Shanghai-based online game developer Art Coding and is a rhythm-based game which requires players to choose one of the two rival characters and tap on a drum to match with icons on the screen to gain points.

The film itself will open in September in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, USA, Canada, Indonesia and Vietnam.

Set in the 1920s, starring Wu Chun, Han Geng and Barbie Hsu, it tells a tale of two orphans growing up in Shanghai Opera troupe and turning rivalry in their quest for fame, love and revenge. The film will open in

“The gaming business is a new frontier for Celestial and our upcoming movie release created a perfect opportunity for us to launch a promotional game and target young audiences who interact with entertainment across broad media including their mobile devices,” said Ross Pollack, CEO, Celestial Pictures.

Pollack said the main reason for Celestial to step into game industry is to provide entertainment for young audience or young game users.  “Our goal is to provide trans-media content.”  Pollack especially pointed out that Celestial has partnered with Sina.com for its Sina Weibo service, which owns 140 million users. For mainland China players, the game has a function tied to their Sina Weibo accounts allowing their scores to be displayed on their Sina Weibo micro-blogging updates.

The next step, according to Pollack is to develop paid online games with the content of Shaw Brothers movies. Celestial owns the 760-title Shaw Brothers library and intellectual property of the films. The next online game will likely be released in 2012, Pollack said.

Earlier this year Celestial announced to hold a screenplay contest in to select new Chinese filmmakers for Shaw Brothers movie remakes. So far, the top six stories have been selected and developed into full-length scripts.

Pollack said Celestial will be the original content provider and IP owners of the new Shaw Brothers games.  And for the distribution of the games in the Chinese-speaking world, Celestial see major Chinese game developers such as Tencent, Shanda Interactive as potential partners in developing the games.

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