Trivia / Hong Kong '97

• Accidentally-Correct Writing: Yes, Deng Xiaoping was still alive at the time of the game's release, but he actually did die in 1997, making his role in the game cohesive.
• Backed by the Pentagon: The credits of the game thank the Canadian Embassy of all things for "cooperation".
• Colbert Bump: The Angry Video Game Nerd gave it more publicity nowadays than it ever got in the 90's. He even inspired the creation of its pages on This Very Wiki; and before that, one of the earliest mentions of the game came from Guru Larry and Wez nearly ten years prior.
• Creator Backlash: Yoshihisa Kurosawa has stated that he'd prefer it if people just forgot about this game.
• Follow the Leader: Hong Kong 97's legacy spawned a spoof, Taiwan 2001, which is supposedly even worse than the former, and bases its premise around the one-China policy. Despite the availability of screenshots, there are no download links available, and it's unknown whether or not physical copies of the game existed.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The game was only distributed by mail order on floppy disks (similar to those used by pirates to create bootleg games), and an even rarer cartridge shown by James Rolfe in an AVGN update video. Most people, the Nerd included^note James Rolfe is normally meticulous about sourcing a physical copy for AVGN episodes, but in this case, finding a physical copy just wasn't practical, opt for playing an emulated ROM of it.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: For years, rumors circulated about the identity of the corpse seen on the Game Over screen. The most common guesses were Polish boxer Leszek Błażynski, Egyptian political activist Farag Foda, or Palestine Liberation Organization member Atef Bseiso, all of whom died violently on the date seen in the timestamp (June 8, 1992)^note Błażynski actually died on August 6, 1992; his inclusion was due to confusion about the DDMMYY format commonly used outside of the USA. It was later revealed that none of these guesses were correct, and it was an image of a victim of the Bosnian genocide from a shock documentary, with director Yoshihisa Kurosawa capturing the image from a LaserDisc copy of the film.
• Real Song Theme Tune: The game's theme song (and only music) is a loop of a communist Chinese propaganda song called "I Love Beijing Tiananmen". Or rather, a loop of the first two lines of the song.
• Similarly Named Works: As stated on the main page, there's also a movie called Hong Kong '97 that predated this game by one year. However, the game has absolutely nothing to do with the movie except for coincidentally sharing the same title and same general plotline (concerning Hong Kong being returned to China in 1997). This is lampshaded by The Angry Video Game Nerd in his review of the game, where he says that he'll consider the game a movie-based game... just so he can say it has nothing to do with the movie.
• Uncredited Role: While Yoshishisa Kurosawa designed the game and most of its audiovisual assets, the actual programming work was done by an unidentified acquaintance of his. Because the programmer's day job was working for Enix, Kurosawa agreed not to credit or identify him.

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