Gaming Oddities- Hong Kong 97

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Happysoft's Hong Kong 97 is a rather simplistic game at first glance, similar to many shmups like Galaga. You move your character horizontally (and to a limited extent, vertically) and fire upward at enemies approaching from the top of the screen. Even in 1995, this type of game was getting a bit stale.

But what if I told you that the game was a piece of anti-Communist propaganda that featured, among things, the use of the f-bomb and a picture of an actual dead body?

After a request for players to sell Happysoft their games, Hong Kong 97 begins with the following text introduction, referring to Hong Kong being transferred to China in 1997. 

The year 1997 has arrived. A herd of fuckin' ugly reds. are rushing from the mainland.

Crime rate skyrockeded! Hongkong is ruined! Therefore, the Hongkong government called Bruce Lee's relative "Chin" for the massacre of the reds. Chin is a killer machine. Wipe out all 1.2 billion of the red communists!

However, in mainland China there was a secret project in progress! A project to transform the deceased Tong Shau Ping into an ultimate weapon!

There are a few problems with this introduction.

• While it's not too surprising to see "fuck" used liberally in modern video games, it's fairly shocking to see it here, when few games used even minor profanity like "damn" or "hell."
• The population of China was around 1.2 billion at the time, so killing 1.2 billion people wouldn't just involve wiping out the entire military, but would also involve slaughtering children, the elderly, those who are unable to serve in the military and countless others who pose no threat.
• On a minor note, "skyrocketed" is misspelled, as well as Deng Xiaoping's name, and the overall writing quality is rather poor. It's not as bad as some video games, but it's still sloppy.

The gameplay, as I mentioned above, is rather basic, and can be seen inn action here. Chin must avoid enemies' attacks and shoot them with what looks like a machine gun, which is fired upward in a straight line. When hit, the enemies are shown exploding in a nuclear explosion, which then is replaced by a picture of a bloody dead body. You can collect powerups that make you invincible, as well as invisible.

As you can imagine, it's rather repetitive, and isn't helped by the fact that the music that I showed in the link- the first two lines of "I Love Beijing Tiananmen," are repeatedly constantly. Yes, this song plays in a game that's about killing all the Chinese.

Every so often, Deng Xiaoping's decapitated head, with a bloody neck stump, will show up as a boss. He attacks by ramming the bottom of the screen, not only forcing you to dodge but preventing you from counterattacking until he moves back up the screen. After taking enough damage, he explodes in a series of nuclear explosions. The player is awarded a decent amount of points, and another wave of normal enemies arrives. Defeating them leads to another boss battle, and the cycle repeats until Chin dies.

Chin dying will probably happen sooner rather than later. Like in many other shmups, he dies in one hit, but unlike other shmups, he has no extra lives. Taking a single hit will send you to a Game Over screen- a picture of a dead body from the Bosnian genocide, with a time stamp from August 6, 1992, and a poorly drawn caption saying "Chin is dead!" Most games would settle for "Game Over" in white text on a black background, but including a picture of a real person's dead body is exceptionally bad taste.

After the Game Over screen, the player is kicked back to the title screen, and can start over. There doesn't seem to be a high score feature, so without the ability to compete against your friends, the default scores or even yourself, there's little incentive to keep playing. The uploader of the gameplay video I linked apparently got bored with the game after playing for less than five minutes (not counting the title screen and introductory text), and probably only stuck with the game for that long to show that the game loops after the boss fight.

From what I heard on Hong Kong 97's TV Tropes page, Yoshihisa Kurosawa created Hong Kong 97 as a protest over Nintendo freezing out unlicensed video game developers, and made the game intentionally bad. One would think that he could find a better way to make that protest, but this is nevertheless a memorable game, if for the wrong reasons.