Hong Kong 97

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Hong Kong 97
Original title 香港 97
Studio HappySoft
Publisher HappySoft
Senior Developer Kowloon Kurosawa
Erstveröffent-
lichung		 JapanJapan April 2, 1995
platform Super Famicom with floppy disk drive
genre Shoot 'em up
Game mode Single player
medium diskette
language Japanese, English, Chinese

Hong Kong 97  ( Japanese 香港 97 ), also Hongkong1997  in capitals , is a multidirectional  shoot 'em up that was released in 1995 as a homebrew computer game on disk for the Super Famicon  .

Production and sales were carried out by the Japanese company HappySoft Ltd. ( 吉 喜 軟体 公司 ), where the name indicates a Chinese. It was developed within a week by underground writer Yoshihisa "Kowloon" Kurosawa ( ク ー ロ ン 黒 沢 , Kūron Kurosawa ). According to Kurosawa, the game emerged as a reaction to the dominance of Nintendo and Sega , who dominated the Japanese game market almost completely and whose strict guidelines and content requirements the games of the time had to follow. Kurosawa therefore wanted to develop a "worst possible game" that runs counter to these specifications as far as possible.

The game has a cult status in Japan and Taiwan  as a  kusoge 'shit game, scrap game' and was also the target of parodies because of its poor quality, various copyright infringements, the plot and its level of difficulty . The British computer game show Wez and Larry's Top Tens  from XLEAGUE.TV listed the game at number 1 on its “ Wacky Japanese Game of All Time ” charts and the  Angry Video Game Nerd  dedicated an episode to it .

action

The game is based on the return of Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China in 1997 . According to the introductory text, the mass immigration of Chinese from the People's Republic (original text: “A herd of fuckin 'ugly reds.”) Led to a crime wave in Hong Kong. As a countermeasure, the Hong Kong government (represented by Chris Patten )  hires  Bruce Lee's relative Chin ( 陳 ; for whom a still image of  Jackie Chan's film  Powerman  is used) to wipe out all 1.2 billion Chinese in the People's Republic. Meanwhile, a secret project is taking place in the People's Republic to bring the dead Tong Shau Ping ( Deng Xiaoping ) back to life as the ultimate weapon. (Deng Xiaoping was still alive at the time the game was released, but died shortly before Hong Kong was returned.)

Game mechanics

The game begins with an advertisement in which the publisher offers on the one hand to sell SNES games that have been sent in, and on the other hand addresses retailers to contact the publisher if they are interested in selling their games.

This is followed by the introduction described above, which is then followed by the actual game without warning. In this the player controls Chin and has to shoot moving Chinese civilians and policemen with stones. If you hit an opponent, it explodes with a (badly cut)  mushroom cloud  and leaves a blinking corpse, and possibly an object that z. B. briefly granted invulnerability.

After a while, vehicles are added and after you have destroyed three of them, the final boss appears. This is Deng Xiaoping's severed and bleeding head who tries to crush the player. After this is defeated, the game starts over.

All of this takes place in front of a static two-tone background image that is randomly selected at the start of the game and represents either Maoist propaganda,  Guilin , the logo of  Asia Television , the Chinese logo of  Coca-Cola or  Mao Zedong .

If Chin is touched by any person or object (other than the one for invulnerability) it will instantly result in game over. A still image of a video with a dead person dated June 8, 1992 is displayed, as well as the English text Chin is Dead! and the grammatically incorrect Chinese text Chén sǐ wáng  ( 陳 死亡 ), which means the same thing. The game then shows the credits, which include the Canadian Embassy in Japan as a contributor, followed by the title screen.

The high level of difficulty of the game is another factor in classifying the game as a kusoge .

The game is multilingual and can be played with English, Japanese or Chinese ( traditional ) texts.

music

The only piece of music are the first two lines from the communist children's song  I love the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing , which are played in an endless loop. The cheerfully recited lyrics stand in stark contrast to the game.

A special feature is that the game is one of the few for the Super Famicon that contains a song.

Apart from the song there are no other sound effects.

reception

Kurosawa self-published the game on diskette, with fans also creating versions on Super Famicon modules . After Hong Kong 97  , HappySoft Ltd. not reappearing.

Despite the associated difficult availability, it achieved dubious fame on the Internet due to its poor quality, endless melody and content. This was limited to Japanese game forums and underground books and then expanded to Taiwan because of its Chinese topic and the Chinese translation it contained. A parody called TW2001 for the  PC was created in Taiwan  .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Kowloon Kurosawa: 香港 97 . In: Six Samana. April 17, 1997. Retrieved November 19, 2017 (Japanese).
  2. ↑ a b Developer of world's worst video game, Hong Kong 1997, ends silence to reveal its strange genesis and beg gamers to drop it. In: South China Morning Post. January 20, 2018, accessed April 13, 2018 .
  3. ↑ Hong Kong 97 - Angry Video Game Nerd - Episode 134 on YouTube

Web links