Kowloon's Gate (PS1): The Full English Translation Patch Is Finally Here After Years of Work

On June 9, 2026, the Hilltop translation team (Hilltop Works) released a complete English translation patch for Kowloon's Gate, a surreal "Asian-gothic cyberpunk" adventure game released exclusively in Japan for the PlayStation in 1997. The project, led by hacker Hilltop and lead translator Cargodin, was announced on May 22 after years of quiet work behind the scenes. Kowloon's Gate drops players into a fantastical version of Hong Kong's Kowloon Walled City, which mysteriously reappears just before the 1997 handover, casting them as a "Supreme Feng Shui Practitioner" tasked with awakening the Four Symbols to restore balance between the spirit world and the living.

Conceived as early as 1992 and announced in 1994, the game only sold modestly (135,000 copies) on release, but went on to build a devoted cult following over the years, eventually inspiring a VR prequel and a now-announced sequel. Hilltop described the translation work as feeling like "chewing glass": over 3,000 individual text boxes spread across the game's four discs, an engine architecture that demanded a custom solution for almost every subtitle system, and even name-length bugs that could break the Circle button's functions entirely. The team also includes _dk handling Cantonese elements, plus Neutronoid and Ninkintn working on the Vietnamese portions.

A heavyweight of the fan translation scene, already behind Racing Lagoon and Aconcagua

The patch is available for free on Hilltop's Patreon page, where the team also details how to apply it to a disc image of the game. To follow upcoming projects and find installation guides for their other translations, head over to the Hilltop Works community page.

Source: Time Extension