Hong Kong 97 (??97), stylized as HONGKONG1997 on the game's boxart, is a 1995 unlicensed multidirectional shooter video game made in Japan for the Super Famicom in disk drive format by HappySoft Ltd., a Japanese homebrew game company. The game was designed by the Japanese game journalist Kowloon Kurosawa (?????? K?ron Kurosawa), who said the game was made in about a week. The game has gained a cult following in Japan and Taiwan for its notoriously poor quality including copyrighted images--it has been ranked as a kusoge, which literally means "shitty game", a game considered "so bad that it's good".
Video Hong Kong 97 (video game)
Plot
The game is set around the transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1997. People from the Chinese Mainland started immigrating to Hong Kong and greatly increased the crime rate. As a countermeasure, Chin (Jackie Chan in his Wheels on Meals appearance), an unspecified relative of Bruce Lee, was hired by the Hong Kong government (represented by Chris Patten) to wipe out all 1.2 billion people in China. But meanwhile, in China, research was underway to bring the dead Tong Shau Ping (Deng Xiaoping) back to life as the "ultimate weapon".
When the game was released in 1995, Deng Xiaoping, said to be dead in the game, was still alive. However, he did die months before the handover in 1997, which is when the game's plot actually takes place.
Maps Hong Kong 97 (video game)
Gameplay
Immediately after the plot introduction (which follows some ads and the title screen), the game begins. The player controls Chin, with the objective being 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 mushroom cloud, leaving behind a flashing corpse and items for instant death or temporary invincibility. After a while, cars start appearing from the sides, moving horizontally across the screen as obstacles. After thirty enemies have been defeated by the player, the final boss, ultimate weapon Tong Shau Ping (depicted as the disembodied, proportionally giant head of Deng Xiaoping), appears. Once he is defeated, the game repeats itself. The game shows static photos as the background; which alternate between pictures of Maoist propaganda, Guilin, the logo for Asia Television, the logo for Chinese Coca-Cola or Mao Zedong in monochrome.
If Chin is hit by anything other than the invincibility item the game is immediately over (unless Chin is under invincibility), and an image of a corpse caught on security camera footage (as seen by the date and time of the image capture at the bottom left corner of the screen) shows as the game over screen. The words "CHIN IS DEAD!" in English and in grammatically incorrect Chinese - "Chén s? wáng" (???) can be interpreted as either "Chin is dead", or as a proper name, "Dead Chin" - are superimposed on the game over screen. The game then goes to the credits (curiously listing the Embassy of Canada to Japan as cooperation partner) and back to the title screen and repeats again. The game is noted for its difficulty, one of the factors that made the game a kuso-ge.
Upon turning on the game, the first two lines of an upbeat "I Love Beijing Tiananmen" song can be heard, which loop endlessly throughout the game. The game can be played in English, Japanese or traditional Chinese.
Development
In January 2018, Yoshihisa "Kowloon" Kurosawa, the person responsible for Hong Kong 97, finally broke his silence on the development of the game to the South China Morning Post. He stated that his goal was to make the worst game possible as a mockery to the game industry. Since Kurosawa did not have much programming skills, he had an Enix employee help him out, with the game being made in two days.
With the game completed, Kurosawa used a game backup device that could copy Super Nintendo games onto floppy disks, devices sold in computer malls of Sham Shui Po. He made some merchandise through articles written under pseudonyms for underground gaming magazines, and set up a mail-order service to sell the game. After selling it for some weeks, he forgot about his little bootleg. He became aware that Hong Kong 97 was gaining some unwanted attention in the late 2000s. Eventually, fans of Hong Kong 97 found his Facebook account and since then he is harassed with questions surrounding the game.
References
External links
- Hong Kong 97 on IMDb
- Game review on Hardcore Gaming 101
- Japanese article about the game in @wiki
- Japanese blog post talking more about the gameplay
Source of article : Wikipedia
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