Super Famicom · 1995 · Japan · Unlicensed Original
A game journalist made a Super Famicom shoot-'em-up in a week, put Jackie Chan's face on it from a film poster, scored it with a stolen LaserDisc track, and sold about thirty copies.
Hong Kong 97 was written by the Japanese games journalist Kowloon Kurosawa and released in 1995 for the Super Famicom, unlicensed, on floppy disk. Kurosawa has said it was intended as satire of the games industry, which is either a defence or an aggravating factor depending on the reader. He made it in seven days with a friend, and since he could not really program, an Enix employee did the actual coding in two days. Everything in it is stolen or arbitrary. The premise concerns the 1997 handover of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to China. The player character is a sprite of Jackie Chan, lifted from a poster for the 1984 martial arts film Wheels on Meals. The music is a single looping audio clip of "I Love Beijing Tiananmen", taken from a second-hand LaserDisc Kurosawa bought on Shanghai Street. Because game backup devices were illegal in Japan at the time, he could not advertise it openly: he wrote articles about it under pseudonyms for underground gaming magazines and ran a mail-order service, selling it for ¥2,000–¥2,500. It sold roughly thirty copies. He had printed several hundred inserts, which he later threw away.
Routinely named one of the worst video games ever made, and beloved for it
Kurosawa's claim that the game was a deliberate satire of the industry is doing a great deal of work, and it is worth taking seriously without taking it entirely at face value. The game is genuinely, structurally hostile: the difficulty is nonsensical, the death animation is a photograph of a mushroom cloud, the single music track loops with a relentlessness that becomes a physical experience, and the whole thing is assembled from copyright infringements. That is either a very pointed comment on what commercial games of the era were made of, or it is what happens when a person with no programming ability makes a game in a week.
The honest answer is probably that both are true. Hong Kong 97 works as satire precisely because it was made with total indifference to whether it worked at all, and the indifference is the argument. It is the rare bad game that could not have been improved without being destroyed.
Almost nobody played Hong Kong 97 in 1995. Its entire cultural existence is a product of emulation: the ROM circulated, and the game found audiences in Japan, Thailand and Taiwan, and then in the West after it became the subject of an Angry Video Game Nerd episode. It is now vastly more famous than any of the legitimate Super Famicom releases it was made alongside.
Kurosawa eventually made his peace with it, putting the game up as a free download from his personal website in 2023 — an unusually graceful ending for a work whose original commercial performance was thirty sales and a bin full of unused inserts.