--- title: "A 19-year-old played Black Myth: Wukong with his thoughts alone" date: 2026-10-27 category: Brain–Computer Interface site: NeuroAI canonical: https://neuroai.site/a/na-neuroxess-mind-controlled-games-chinese language: en --- # A 19-year-old played Black Myth: Wukong with his thoughts alone > Shanghai's NeuroXess used a 256-channel flexible implant to let an epilepsy patient play AAA games and decode Chinese speech in real time. The patient was supposed to be resting. Instead, hooked to a 256-channel brain implant and a decoder, he was clearing levels of Black Myth: Wukong (黑神话：悟空) using nothing but intention. No controller. No voice. Just a neural signal mapped to a cursor, then to a character on screen. That scene, documented by NeuroXess (脑虎科技) after an April 2025 clinical trial at Shanghai Huashan Hospital, is the clearest picture yet of how far China's invasive brain-computer interface (脑机接口) work has pushed in a single year. ## Key takeaways - NeuroXess implanted a self-developed 256-channel high-throughput flexible BCI in a 19-year-old epilepsy patient and, after 19.87 hours of training, let him play Pac-Man, Battle City, Honor of Kings (王者荣耀) and Black Myth: Wukong by thought. - The same platform reached 71.2% real-time decoding accuracy across 142 common Chinese syllables, with single-character latency under 100 ms. - Trials ran at Fudan University's Huashan Hospital with support from the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute (TCCI, 天桥脑科学研究院) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Shanghai Microsystem Institute. - NeuroXess claims to be the only invasive BCI company globally to have demonstrated both real-time motor decoding and real-time Chinese language decoding. ## The games as a benchmark The April 2025 case is striking because it used a hard, real-world target. After 19.87 hours of classic calibration paradigms — Center-out and WebGrid — the subject controlled a cursor well enough to handle both retro games and demanding modern titles. Through NeuroXess's XessOS operating system, he also browsed Bilibili and Xiaohongshu, and steered a smart wheelchair and home devices. A useful, honest benchmark sits in the numbers: the team reported a cursor-control rate of 4.07 bits per second after those ~20 hours of training. Neuralink's first human subject, Noland, reached 4.6 bits per second after roughly 60 hours. The comparison is approximate — different tasks, different users — but it shows the performance gap between Chinese and U.S. invasive systems is far narrower than it was two years ago. Training, not magic, produced the result. The Center-out paradigm first calibrated the model: a position-velocity Kalman filter turned 256-channel ECoG signals into cursor-velocity commands in real time. As training hours accumulated, the subject's motor-imagery control grew faster and more accurate. WebGrid then raised difficulty by forcing the cursor to specific grid cells, continuously sharpening neural control before multi-scene apps were unlocked through XessOS. That staged ramp — calibrate, then harden, then expand — is the actual clinical recipe behind the headline "plays Black Myth: Wukong." ## Decoding Chinese, not just movement Motor control is only half the story. In a separate December 2024 trial announced in January 2025, NeuroXess worked with Huashan Hospital's neurosurgery team to decode spoken Chinese in real time from a patient with a lesion in the language cortex. Chinese is a hard target for decoding: a tonal, logographic language built from largely monosyllabic units, drawing on more dispersed brain regions than alphabetic languages. The system reached 71.2% accuracy across 142 common syllables, with sub-100 ms latency per character — described as the highest real-time Chinese decoding level reported in China to date. For patients who have lost speech to stroke, ALS (渐冻症) or injury, that is the line between silence and communication. ## Why a flexible, high-channel implant NeuroXess was founded in 2021 and is led by chief scientist Tao Hu (陶虎), with Peng Lei (彭雷) as CEO. Its core hardware is a flexible electrode array — thin enough to reduce the inflammatory and scarring response that plagues rigid implants, and dense enough (256 channels) to record high-resolution electrical activity across brain regions. In an earlier August 2024 case, a 21-year-old epilepsy patient received the implant and, using High Gamma band features and an LSTM decoding model with under 60 ms system latency, was playing Ping-Pong and Snake within two days of surgery. Language and motor trials could begin just 48 hours after implantation because the high channel count let surgeons map functional areas quickly. ## Honest limitations These are still small, early, and selective. Every case reported so far involved epilepsy or tumor patients whose surgery created a narrow, ethically justified window for testing — not chronic paralysis patients who would need years of stable implants. Sample sizes are single digits. The 71.2% Chinese-syllable accuracy is real but not conversation-ready; a quarter of syllables would still be wrong in live use. And "real-time decoding" here means a research-grade pipeline, not a certified consumer or clinical product. The comparison to Neuralink should also be read carefully: it speaks to cursor performance, not to safety profile, battery life, implant longevity, or regulatory status. NeuroXess has said a wireless version is in design and that it aims to complete Class III medical-device registration within roughly three years — a plan, not an achievement. ## What readers can do now - Researchers and clinicians should follow Huashan Hospital's BCI publications and the TCCI-supported trials for the next open datasets; language decoding is the fastest-moving subfield. - Investors watching neurotech should separate surgical-first invasive players like NeuroXess from non-invasive consumer BCI firms — the regulatory and reimbursement paths are completely different. - Anyone curious about the field can try a non-invasive EEG headset to feel how noisy real brain signals are; it builds healthy skepticism about "mind control" headlines. --- Published by NeuroAI (https://neuroai.site/) — https://neuroai.site/a/na-neuroxess-mind-controlled-games-chinese Free to quote with attribution and a link to the original.