Hong Kong 97 (video game)

Hong Kong 97
Box art
Developer(s) HappySoft
Publisher(s) HappySoft
Designer(s) Yoshihisa "Kowloon" Kurosawa[1]
Platform(s) Super Famicom with floppy disk drive
Release 1995
Genre(s) Multidirectional shooter
Mode(s) Single-player

Hong Kong 97 (香港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 (クーロン黒沢 Kūron Kurosawa), who said the game was made in two days.[1][2] The game has gained a cult following in Japan and Taiwan for its notoriously poor quality including copyrighted images and uncanny dialogue—it has been ranked as a kusoge, which literally means "shitty game", a game considered "so bad that it's good".

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 and a heroin addict,[3] 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.[4]

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 downwards from the top of 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 a still image of a corpse with bullet holes, caught on a camera footage, is shown as the game over screen. The words "CHIN IS DEAD!" in English and in grammatically incorrect Chinese – "Chén sǐ wáng" (陳死亡) 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 kusoge.

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.[1] 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 a few months, he forgot about his 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 has been harassed with questions surrounding the game.[1]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Shamdasani, Pavan (2018-02-02). "Developer of world's worst video game, Hong Kong 1997, ends silence to reveal its strange genesis and beg gamers to drop it". South China Morning Post. Hong Kong. Retrieved 2018-04-30.
  2. ↑ Kowloon Kurosawa. 香港97 [Hong Kong 97]. Six Samana (in Japanese). Retrieved March 26, 2015.
  3. ↑ "３ ＷＨＡＴ'Ｓ クーロン黒沢って誰やねん？" (in Japanese). Yahoo! GeoCities. Retrieved 2018-08-31.
  4. ↑ Plunkett, Luke. "Racism, Violence & Madness Make This Awful Hong Kong Game One to Remember". Kotaku. Retrieved January 19, 2018.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.