Hong Kong 97

Box art

***Hong Kong 97*** (stylized as ***Hong Kong 1997*** in the cover) is an unlicensed shoot 'em up video game developed and published by HappySoft, a doujin game developer, for the Super Famicom and its addon, the Super Famicom CD. It was released in Japan in 1995, being sold as CDs, floppy disks and ROMS. Designed by the Japanese game journalist Kowloon Kurosawa, who said the game is a satire of the video game industry, *Hong Kong 97* was made in two days with the help of his friend, a former Square Enix employee.

The game takes place in China in 1997, during the handover of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom. Facing increased crime rate due to immigration from Mainland China, the Hong Kong government hires Master Chang, a super-powerful relative of Bruce Lee, to kill the entire population of China. At the same time, the deceased Tong Shau Ping is resurrected by a secret project conducted by the Chinese government as an "ultimate weapon". After defeating Tong Shau Ping, the game is repeated indefinitely until Master Chang dies. *Hong Kong 97* sold around 50-55 copies due to its underground bootleg release, and it has since gained a cult following for its notoriously poor quality. In retrospect, it is considered by critics and journalists to be among the worst games ever made.

## Plot

***Hong Kong 97*** begins with a short cutscene, with the first half being full-motion video footage of the Tiananmen Square protests, and the rest of it as a slideshow which places the game around the transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1997. People from Mainland China (described in the English script as "fuckin' ugly reds" [*sic*] and in the Japanese script as "dirty people spitting sputum") started immigrating to Hong Kong, causing a large increase in crime rate. As a countermeasure, the Hong Kong government (represented in-game by Governor Chris Patten) hires Master Chang (portrayed by Jackie Chan), an unspecified relative of Bruce Lee, to "wipe out" all 1.2 billion of the "red communists" in China. Meanwhile, a secret project in Mainland China has succeeded in resurrecting Tong Shau Ping as the "ultimate weapon".

The Chinese translation of the game refers to Master Chang as "Mister Chan" (Chinese: 陳先生; pinyin: *Chén xiānshēng*), alluding to the fact that a picture of Jackie Chan, taken from the 1984 film *Wheels on Meals*, was used to depict the character. The back of the insert of the game notes that Master Chang is a heroin addict.

## Gameplay

The player controls Master Chang, who must shoot and evade the Chinese populace, police officers and People's Liberation Army soldiers moving downwards from the top of the screen. When shot, the enemies explode in mushroom clouds, leaving behind a flashing corpse and items for instant death or temporary invincibility. After a while, cars and buses start appearing from the sides, moving horizontally across the screen as obstacles. After thirty enemies have been defeated by the player, the final boss, the "ultimate weapon" Tong Shau Ping appears. Once he is defeated, the game repeats itself. The game shows full-motion video as the background, which alternate between footage of the Tiananmen Square protests, B-roll footage of Hong Kong, behind-the-scenes footage of *Wheels on Meals*, footage of the Soviet-Afghan War, a Chinese Coca-Cola commercial and a shot of the British Hong Kong flag waving on a flagpole.

Sporadically, a syringe appears as a power-up, which grants Master Chang temporary invincibility. The player has no health points: if Master Chang is hit by anything other than an item, the game is immediately over, unless Master Chang is under invincibility. The game over screen contains the superimposed words "CHANG IS DEAD!!" in English and grammatically incorrect Chinese "陳死亡" (pinyin: *Chén sǐ wáng*) over a still graphic image of a dead body, dated to 1992. The game then goes to the credits (listing the Embassy of Canada and Anthony Hopkins as cooperation partners) and back to the title screen.

Upon turning on the game, the first three measures of the chorus of an upbeat rock-style rendition of "I Love Beijing Tiananmen" can be heard, which loops indefinitely throughout the game. The game has no other music or sound effects. It can be played in English, Japanese or traditional Chinese.

## Development

In January 2018, Kowloon Kurosawa 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 of the game industry. Since Kurosawa did not have much programming skill, he had an Enix employee help him out, with the game being made in two days. He later asked a friend with basic knowledge of English to translate the story into this language, as well as an exchange student from Hong Kong to translate it into Chinese. Kurosawa took the music, an audio clip from "I Love Beijing Tiananmen", from a second-hand LaserDisc he got in Shanghai Street, and the main character sprite, depicting Jackie Chan, was taken from a movie poster of *Wheels on Meals*, a 1984 Hong Kong martial arts film. The FMV seen within the game was taken from various VHS tapes that he found in several different shops around Hong Kong.

With the game completed, Kurosawa used a game backup device that could copy Super Famicom games onto floppy disks, which he found whilst wandering through the computer malls of Sham Shui Po. Due to game backup devices being illegal in Japan at the time, Kurosawa could only advertise his game through articles written under pseudonyms for underground gaming magazines. He set up a mail-order service to sell the game on CDs and cartridges, as well as some ROMS, for ¥2,000 – ¥2,500 ($20–$25 in USD). It sold only about 50 copies, despite him having printed several hundred copies of the insert, which he later gave approximately half away to people, before throwing away the rest of them. He eventually forgot about the game, until he became aware that it was gaining some unwanted attention in the late 2000s. Eventually, his Facebook account was discovered and was bombarded with questions about the game.

## Reception

In an advertisement in the underground magazine *Game Urara* for another HappySoft title, *The Story of Kamikuishiki Village*, *Hong Kong 97*'s poor quality is acknowledged, with the advert referring to the game as "dreadful" and "incomprehensible". It also claims that bootleg copies of the game were widely sold in Hong Kong, Bangkok, Taipei and Tokyo.

The game would garner small attention on several Usenet forums in Japan for its strangeness and the mystery of who made it at the time. In 1998, a ROM of *Hong Kong 97* was uploaded to a Japanese Geocities website, where it would eventually be found in the mid-2000s, and its attention rose from there.

In retrospective reviews, *Hong Kong 97* was met with overwhelmingly negative reception, with many calling it one of the worst video games ever made. The game has garnered a "so bad, it's good" cult following in Japan, Thailand and Taiwan, and in the West after footage of the game was uploaded to Bokkusu in the late 2000s as well as being the subject of an *Angry Video Game Nerd* episode,