"When I was young, I harboured a dream of working in the games industry, but I disliked Nintendo games. The settings and the characters all felt stale. In those days, all games were manufactured by Nintendo and Sega, so it was impossible to put out your own indie game. You were subject to rules and ethical standards, and you had to pay steep royalties just to make a game. I was sick and tired of consumer game systems and the way Nintendo were at the top of the pyramid. I had an idea to create a cheap, vulgar game that would make fun of the industry. The emergence of game copiers finally gave me that opportunity. With one of them, you could make games and distribute them without needing Nintendo’s permission. The game turned out that way because that was all the time we had. What you see represents a 10th of what I intended to do. There was no time. We didn’t have money. We didn’t have permission. We just sort of took a slapdash approach to giving it a Hong Kong-esque style, and that’s the result. The goal was simply to create a vulgar game and I thought it would be more fun for the gameplay to be a failure. But honestly, I just wish people would forget about the game once and for all.”
— Yoshihisa Kurosawa on creating Hong Kong '97
"It was made by HappySoft. HappySoft was most famous for making...Hong Kong '97, their one and only masterpiece. On this one occasion, they rose from the depths of hell, excreted this unholy turd onto the Earth, and then descended back to where they came!"
"The year 1997 has arrived. A herd of fucking ugly reds are rush—(game continues to next screen)—alright, don't let me read. Crime rate skyrocketed. Hong Kong is ruined! Therefore, the—(game continues)—come on, seriously. Who can read that fast? For the massacre of the reds. Chin is a killer mach—(game continues)—come...! (laughs) However, in mainland China there was a secret project in pr—(game continues)—game, ser, um, are, are Chinese people really that fast at reading where they can read the entire thing at the speed of, like, I guess, 50% faster than us."
"Chin IS DEAD!!"
— The infamous Game Over screen
