"We Don't Chase the Wind — We Make It": A Conversation with Kun Peng

If the Chinese interactive film wave has an architect, it’s Kun Peng (鹍鹏) — “Gary” to his international colleagues. Founder, chairman and CEO of Huying Technology, the Beijing-and-Shanghai company behind the ALTSTORY interactive film brand and the ALT Lab game label, he spent nearly a decade building toward a bet the rest of the industry considered lost: that audiences want films that answer back.

The bet paid. Breakout 13, ALT Lab’s live-action drama about internet-addiction “correction” institutes, sold over a million copies, reached #2 on Steam’s global chart, screened in Cannes Next 2023 and took two NYX Game Awards. Before that came China’s first interactive drama series for Tencent Video and a Bilibili live-voting experiment with millions of participants. Forbes put him on its 30 Under 30 Asia list in 2020. This June, on the AltNext stage he co-hosts with Shanghai Film Group during the Shanghai International Film Festival, he unveiled AltFlow, an AI agent system for interactive-narrative creation.

We talked about the long wait, the heaviest story in the catalogue, and what comes after footage.

Kun Peng presenting at AltNext 2026, Shanghai.

“The next generation would be the interactive generation”

You founded Huying in 2017, after a VR film company before that. What did you see?

Back then I simply felt the next generation would be the interactive generation. Many of us on the team are gamers — we love interactive narrative. For me it was works like Heavy Rain, and emotionally NieR: Automata: that game is about others coming to help you at the edge of despair, and you discover how bright the world actually is. When a story does that to you because you took part in it, you don’t go back.

A decade ago “interactive film” was considered a dead category in the West.

Participation is active. Being active creates deeper emotional resonance, and that resonance is a fundamental human need — that’s not a trend, it’s substrate. Interactivity changes the connection between user and content, and it creates an experience non-interactive content simply cannot. We never really thought of what we were doing as “enduring” through a dead category. We waited five years — and in those five years we built our zero-to-one technology platform and learned how to fuse a team across three disciplines: content creation, interaction design, technical innovation. None of the three can be missing.

The heaviest story first

Breakout 13 is not an obvious commercial bet — a drama about correction camps, drawn from documented true stories.

It’s a story our generation carries. Members of our narrative team lived close to it — one of our leads was nearly sent to one of those institutions as a teenager. The abuses the game depicts were exposed by Chinese journalists; the institutions were condemned and shut down. Our work was to turn that documented reality into something you don’t watch but survive — because the moment the choice is yours, the institution’s pressure is yours too. That’s what interactive film can do that no documentary can.

It went to Cannes.

Cannes Next selected it as an interactive work fusing cinematic style and interactive storytelling — the only Chinese work in the section that year. For a team that had been told for years this category was a dead end, standing there mattered.

Speaking at a Shanghai culture-industry conference, 2023.

The wave, and the West

Revenge on Gold Diggers put up numbers no Western FMV ever has. Now both films are heading to iPhone in the West. Why is mobile the beachhead?

Any product that quickly earns big streaming flow on mobile comes with interactivity — the phone audience is already trained: short drama, vertical series, one-more-episode nights. The screen where those hundreds of millions of hours live is the natural home of the playable film. The West built beautiful one-off works; what China built is an industry. When an industry meets an open lane, it moves.

After footage

At AltNext you announced AltFlow — AI agents for interactive-narrative creation. Where does this go?

AI is the phone call this category was waiting for — it has the chance to multiply the whole thing by ten, by a hundred. Seventy to eighty percent of the problems, AI can solve. What remains is the creator’s inspiration — and that is the most important thing a creator has. Every era of this form pre-shot its branches. The next one won’t have to.

Last question. You’ve said you don’t follow trends.

We don’t chase the wind — we make it. And honestly: you are always creating anyway. Every choice you make in life is part of an irreversible interactive-narrative experience. We just put a camera on it.

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Kun Peng’s ALT Lab titles — Breakout 13 and, in international distribution, Revenge on Gold Diggers — are part of our publisher’s catalogue; see our disclosure policy. Quotes drawn from conversations and public remarks, translated from Mandarin and edited for length and clarity.