Hong Kong 97

Story & overview

About the game

Hong Kong 97 is a 1995 multidirectional shooter video game made in Japan for the Super Famicom in disk drive format by HappySoft Ltd., a homebrew game company. The game was designed by the Japanese game journalist Kowloon Kurosawa (クーロン黒沢), 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 — it has been ranked as a kusoge, which literally means "shitty game", a game considered "so bad that it's good". It has since been given multiple parody treatments. The game also achieved Number One "Wacky Japanese Game of All Time" in the XLEAGUE.TV video game TV show Wez and Larry's Top Tens and was featured in an episode of the Angry Video Game Nerd.

The game is set around the transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1997. It is said that, at the time, people from the Chinese Mainland (called "fuckin' ugly reds", making this one of very few games on the Super Famicom that contains cursing) started immigrating to Hong Kong and generally increasing the crime rate. As a countermeasure, Chin (Jackie Chan in his Wheels on Meals appearance), a relative of Bruce Lee, was hired by the Hong Kong government (represented by Chris Patten) to wipe out all 1.2 billion people of China. But meanwhile, in China, research was underway to bring the dead "Tong Shau Ping" (Deng Xiaoping) back to life as the ultimate doomsday machine. 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, which is when the game's plot actually takes place.