As far as bootlegs go, Hong Kong 97 might be one of the most popular. The use of unlicensed imagery and overall poor quality of the experience propelled it to internet meme status years back, and helped the game grow a cult following. Here's the Wiki breakdown on the game if you want to know what it's about.
The game is set around the transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1997. People from the Chinese Mainland started immigrating to Hong Kong and greatly increased the crime rate. As a countermeasure, Chin (Jackie Chan in his Wheels on Meals appearance), an unspecified relative of Bruce Lee, was hired by the Hong Kong government (represented by Chris Patten) to wipe out all 1.2 billion people in China. But meanwhile, in China, research was underway to bring the dead Tong Shau Ping (Deng Xiaoping) back to life as the "ultimate weapon".
All these years later, developer Yoshihisa Kurosawa has stepped forward to discuss how the game came to be. It's certainly a telling interview, to say the least.
- the goal was to make the worst game possible
- when Kurosawa was young, he wanted to work in the games industry
- Kurosawa disliked Nintendo games for their stale settings and characters
- at the time, indie games were impossible thanks to steep royalties and rules and ethical standards
- eventually Kurosawa found devices capable of copying games onto floppy disks, used to make bootleg copies
- Kurosawa decided to make a game making fun of the game industry, and decided to set the game in Hong Kong.
- he had interest in what would unfold in 1997, feeling a sense of anticipation but also anxiety
- China still seemed like a world of savages to Kurosawa, and wondered what would happen if the two intermingled
- Kurosawa lacked programming skills, so asked an Enix employee friend to help out
- the dev had two days to work on the game
- Deng Xiaoping and Jackie Chan’s looks were from a movie poster
- a track from a laserdisc from Shanghai Street was used for the BGM
- Kurosawa resorted to pseudonym-written articles in underground gaming magazines to drum up anticipation
- he used a mail-order service to sell the game
- Kurosawa was bombarded years later with questions that were reading too much into the game
- the goal was simply to create a vulgar game
- Kurosawa now wishes people would forget about the game
from GoNintendo
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