Hong Kong 97 is a video game made for the Super Famicom, developed by Happysoft in 1995. In Japan and Taiwan, this game has gained cult status and been labelled as a kuso-ge (which in the literal sense, means "shitty game").
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!
Overview
This game's story is heavily anti-communist. Oddly for an unlicensed game, it has Japanese, English and Chinese modes. The language in the English version is vulgar and contains Engrish. The music is a loop of the first three bars of I Love Beijing Tiananmen which plays through the entire game, and there are no sound effects.
Gameplay
Immediately after the introduction above (which follows some ads and the title screen), the game starts without any warning. (What usually follows is an instant game over.) 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 instant death or temporary invincibility.
After a while cars appear from the sides, and, after three cars, the final boss appears. The final boss is actually Deng Xiaoping's head from the title screen, and once he is defeated, the game repeats itself. All these happen with a stagnant photo as the background, it is random and might be 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 a badly toned Chinese "Chén sǐ wáng" (陳死亡), 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 again.
Trivia
- Despite being made in 1995, the game correctly predicted that Deng Xiaoping would die in 1997. Xiaoping died on February 19th, 1997 at the age of 92 from a lung infection and Parkinson's disease.
- The game was designed by the Japanese game journalist, Kowloon Kurosawa. Kowloon said that the game was made in about a week.
- There's a site that possibly has been made by the creators of Hong Kong '97.
- If you stay too long in the boss battle, the Deng XiaoPing head will explode.
- Chin on the title screen is ripped from the 1984 Jackie Chan film Wheels On Meals.
Gallery
