'Hong Kong 97' Game Developer Wants Everyone to Forget the Game
Yoshihisa Kurosawa envisioned making the "worst game possible" in the bootleg Super Nintendo game "Hong Kong 97." While he has succeeded in doing so, he did not think it will get the attention that it is getting 10 years later.
This is what he opened up about in a recent interview with South China Morning Post. A decade later since he released "Hong Kong 97," the game has evolved into a classic, thanks to the internet.
It was considered so bad that it is good in the same vein as Tommy Wiseau's "The Room," which meant there was a lot of interest surrounding it that often led to scrutiny down to every detail — and he was not happy about any of that.
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He shared, "I thought it was just a fad, but the interest seems to be growing every year. Every day I get questions on Facebook from all around the world, from people I've never heard of...People have started to read too much into the game...The entire setting and context was just stuff I made up as I went along. The questions are endless, so I just ignore them all."
Kurosawa, who never dabbled into gaming after "Hong Kong 97" save for a PlayStation 2 first person shooter, insists that there is really no use thinking about it too much because he himself did not do that when he made the game. In fact, he wants people to just let it go.
In the same interview, Kurosawa talked about his dream to be in the game industry when he was young, but the struggle was in making it big as Nintendo and Sega ruled that sphere that time. He was not a fan of their "stale" settings and characters, so during his trip in Hong Kong, he decided to make "Hong Kong 97" as a way to make fun of the industry.
The game was put together within a week with a friend who could code for two days on the project. They used bootleg devices that could copy Super Nintendo games onto floppy disks, which Kurosawa came by while walking around computer malls of Sham Shui Po.
"Hong Kong 97" was set during the transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong that led to Chinese people migrating to the region. It featured images of Deng Xiaoping and Jackie Chan from movie posters and soundtrack from a laserdisc he got from Shanghai Street.
The game followed Chin, who is literally based off of Chan as he appeared in "Wheels on Meals," tasked by the government in the person of alternate universe Chris Patten to kill all 1.2 billion people in China he described in the game as "ugly reds."
