Hong Kong 97

Hong Kong 97
Title screen of Hong Kong 97.
Publisher	HappySoft
Developer	Kowloon Kurosawa
Console	Super Famicom
Date	1995

Hong Kong 97 is an unpublished video game made for the Super Famicom, developed by HappySoft in 1995. In Japan and Taiwan, this game has gained cult status and been labeled as a kuso-ge (which in the literal sense, means "shitty game" in Japanese), and some have labeled it as one of the worst games ever made.

Story

Quoted from the game's English mode with spelling and grammatical errors left intact:

The year 1997 has arrived. A herd of fuckin' ugly reds. are rushing from the mainland. Crime rate skyrockeded! Hongkong is ruined! Therefore, the Hongkong government called Bruce Lee's relative "Chin" for the massacre of the Reds. Chin is a killer machine. Wipe out all 1.2 billion of the red communists! However, in mainland China, there was a secret project in progress! A project to transform the deceased Tong Shau Ping into an ultimate weapon!

Development

The game was designed by a Japanese journalist under the pseudonym "Kowloon Kurosawa". Kurosawa said the game was made in about a week and was supposed to mock Nintendo's strict quality standards for licensing a game. This game was never actually published in stores, with Kurosawa sending copies himself via post.

Numerous celebrities had their likenesses ripped and translated into a 16-bit format without permission, notably Jackie Chan from Wheels on Meals (As Chin), Bruce Lee, Chris Patten, Deng Xiaoping, and The Coca-Cola Company.

This game's story is heavily anti-communist. Even though it had almost no release and was unlicensed, the game has 3 languages (Japanese, Traditional Chinese, and English). The language in the English version is comprised of vulgar Engrish. The only sound is the first three measures of the Communist song "I Love Beijing Tiananmen", which loops for the entire game. The loop lasts for only six seconds and doesn't stop even during the Game Over screen, or when the game is going back to the title screen afterward.

For years there was speculation over the source and identity of the game over screen, a gory photograph of a dead man. Popular theories were Polish boxer Leszek Błażyński, Palestine activist Atef Bseiso, or Egyptian author Farag Foda. The actual source was finally identified in 2019: it is a still from the Japanese shockumentary New Death File III (新・デスファイルIII), depicting an unidentified man killed during the Bosnian War in 1992.(source is NSFW.)

Gameplay

Immediately after the introduction above (which follows some ads and the title screen), the game starts without any warning. Since you die in one hit, if you're not prepared you will often die almost instantly. The player controls Chin, who tries to shoot and evade the Chinese populace and police officers moving about and spitting randomly on the screen. When shot, the enemies explode in a rectangle with a mushroom cloud, leaving behind a flashing corpse and items for either instant death or temporary invincibility.

After a while cars appear from the sides trying to run you over, and, after three cars, the final boss appears. The final boss is Tong Shau Ping, represented by the giant severed head of Deng Xiaoping. After a time, Ping will explode (this may not be related to how many hits he takes) and will give several hundred kills. The game then continues until more cars appear to summon another Tong Shau Ping, which repeats forever. The background is a random picture selected from among pictures of Maoist propaganda, Guilin, the logo for Asia Television Limited, the logo for the Chinese Coca-Cola or even Mao Zedong in monochrome, all of which were apparently taken from the Internet as evidenced by the JPEG artifacts.

If Chin is hit by anything other than the invincibility item, the game is immediately over (unless Chin is under invincibility), and a gruesome image of a corpse appears as the game over screen, with the words "CHIN IS DEAD!" in English and in improper Chinese "Chén sǐ wáng" (陳死亡), which can be interpreted as either "Chin is dead", or as a proper name "Dead Chin") superimposed on the screen. Then the game goes to the credits and back to the title screen and repeats.

Gallery

Package

Ksgmatome.jpg

Known box art of the game.

A floppy disk of the game.

Possible alternate cover, found by @lastgamerjop on Instagram.

Screenshots

Notes

• Despite being made in 1995, the game correctly predicted that Deng Xiaoping would die in 1997. Deng died on February 19th, 1997 at the age of 92 from a lung infection and Parkinson's disease.