Yoozoo Games is best known for its Game of Thrones: Winter Is Coming game, as well as its upcoming movie adaptation of popular sci-fi novel series “The Three-Body Problem.”
The chairman and chief executive of Chinese game publisher Yoozoo Games Co. Ltd. died Friday after a suspected poisoning by a co-worker, in a case that has riveted China due to its connection with a best-selling sci-fi series.
Yoozoo announced the death of Lin Qi, 39, on Friday, following the Shanghai police’s announcement of his hospitalization Wednesday due to suspected poisoning.
“Goodbye youth,” the company said in a message on its official microblog, using a word that is part of several of its hit game titles. It added it would continue to “forge ahead” in the name of goodness and benevolence.
Police said they had arrested Lin’s colleague, a 39-year-old male whose last name was only given as Xu, who is suspected of the poisoning.
Several gaming industry sources told Caixin the arrested person could be Xu Yao, a former Yoozoo director who works at the company’s motion picture subsidiary, where he was leading a project to create films based on the acclaimed “The Three-Body Problem” science fiction novels.
Xu has a background in law, graduating from the insurance law school at France’s Paul Cézanne University in 2006 and subsequently completing studies at the University of Michigan’s law school in the U.S. two years later. He later returned to China and worked at well-known financial conglomerate Fosun Group before joining Yoozoo in 2017.
He resigned from the company’s board in 2019 and went to its film division. It was there that he took charge of his “The Three-Body Problem” project, based on the wildly popular sci-fi series by Liu Cixin that has also developed an overseas following after being translated into English.
– This article was written by Guan Cong, Denise Jia, and Yang Ge of Caixin Global. It originally appeared on Caixin Global.
