Hong Kong 97

Oh wow. Sometimes, you have no idea how morbid the things in these pages can be. This page contains content that is not safe for life, whether it be you or anyone in proximity to you. Such as: Panel 3 of the game's story uses a background image consisting of dead corpses.

Hong Kong 97 is... something, alright. The "game" was designed by Japanese video game journalist Yoshihisa "Kowloon" Kurosawa, and was made in about one week with the intention to give the middle finger to China and Nintendo, alongside being the worst video game of all-time.

As was common for unlicensed games at the time, Hong Kong 97 was released on floppy disk rather than cartridge, and did not sell many copies. This has made finding genuine physical copies something of a needle in a haystack - only one known disk has been found.

Unused Graphics#

An unused number nine (九), meant for the game's score. The score only goes up to eight before dropping down to zero, leaving this graphic unused.

Unused 16×16 and 8×8 letters meant for the language select and story panels. The 16×16 "M" is used in the Geocities variant of the game as part of the "CM" button on the language select menu.

Unused Tiles#

The game contains unused tiles for panel 2 Chin, Chris Patten, and panel 3 Chin loaded in V-RAM of their respective story panels. Implementing the unused tiles reveals that the sprites were originally larger than normally seen in-game.

Panel 2#

In-Game	Full (Mockup)

Chin's sprite is taller by one tile. The bottom two rows of the unused tiles are fully brown.

In-Game	Full (Mockup)

Same thing for Chris Patten's sprite, although the bottom three rows of the unused tiles are blank.

Panel 3#

In-Game	Full (Mockup)	In-Game (Title Screen)

Chin's sprite is much larger than ever used in the game. A similar graphic is used on the title screen, although flipped horizontally.

Obscured Graphics#

Backgrounds for panel 2 and panel 3 of the story are not fully seen in-game, as they are partially obscured by the characters present on the panel.

Background for panel 2.

The following content is and has been hidden by default. Click to reveal content: ;
Background for panel 3.

Oddities#

To do: Add a comparison of all three translations of the game's story. Some of them have details not present in other translations.

Resetting#

If the game is reset after the player has entered the stage, the background will switch to the next one in order, even if the player didn't die before resetting. Switching to a different language option on the main menu does not affect it.

Revisional Differences#

Geocities Variant#

There is an alternate version available to download from a Geocities website that documented Kurosawa's life, which contains some differences from the more commonly-seen ROM of the game.

Original Dump	Geocities Variant

The language select adds a fourth option, "CM", which displays two advertisements (see below) before continuing in Japanese.

Message	Translation
	Disk drive back up machine for the Super Famicom! Family Partner FP32 The price is 29,800 yen
	"Ka Rei" ~Curry~ PC Network Tokyo Junk Workshop 03-3222-9800 All 32 lines 28800bps Open 24 hours

At address 0x81C0, the game's title string is missing the "(J)" present in the widely-seen ROM.

HongKong97 (J)        

HongKong97            

Chika Gēmusentā Dump#

On Kowloon Kurosawa's official website, exists a dump of the game as part of the Chika Gēmusentā (地下ゲームセンター) preservation group. This version is very similar to the widely-known ROM given out by Kurosawa in 2023, but has slight differences.

From address range 0x00 to 0x50 exist strings that are not seen in any other dump of the game. It also offsets all of the game's data by 7 bytes.

SF4000

TEXTdosa

«xS‚

It's worth noting that "SF4000" seems to be the actual file name of the game when playing it on real hardware.²

The game's title string is missing the "(J)" like in the Geocities variant, but at address 0x8240 instead.

References#