The infamous Hong Kong 97, released in 1995 as a bootleg SNES game, is getting an official sequel. Hong Kong 2097 is set to release in December 2025 on Steam, inheriting much of the first game’s “trashy DNA,” developer Happy Soft says. The predecessor’s original author Yoshihisa “Kowloon” Kurosawa is involved in production, according to Game*Spark.
Widely acknowledged (and self-proclaimed) as one of the most atrocious games ever made, Hong Kong 97 is a 16-bit shooter released as an underground SNES title (only on a floppy disk, no official cartridge). You play as undercover agent Chin, a long-lost relative of Bruce Lee, who is sent to Hong Kong on a mission to kill all 1.2 billion Chinese people who came from mainland China after the territory’s sovereignty was transferred from Britain.
Gameplay consists of shooting down soldiers and dodging attacks from communist leader Deng Xiaoping’s giant, floating head. The game was developed in a matter of a couple of days with a virtually nonexistent budget, sampling movie posters, Chinese patriotic music and other existing content for its assets.
However, Hong Kong 97 was intentionally hot trash. Creator Kurosawa told South China Morning Post in 2018 that it was his goal to “make the worst game possible.” He originally aspired to enter the game industry, but eventually grew “sick and tired” of the console game market of the time, which was ruled over by Nintendo’s strict ethical standards and high royalties. “I had an idea to create a cheap, vulgar game that would make fun of the industry.”
When Hong Kong 97 started gaining a cult following years after its release, Kurosawa was not exactly delighted, telling players to stop taking it so seriously and lay off with the questions. But shockingly, it looks like he’s back with a sequel.
The new Hong Kong 2097 is a “mind-numbing” twin stick shooter in which protagonist Chin makes a comeback. This time, he’s tasked by God to wipe out the population of the fictional country of “Amurikka” and establish a utopia. The sequel promises a more solid gameplay experience than its predecessor, but with an equally inappropriate and tasteless story.
It seems that the motivation behind the new title was the intensifying censorship of video games in recent years. “In a world of encroaching censorship and social media algorithms crushing our freedom of thought, Hong Kong 2097 and its disrespect for all that is sacred is a breath of fresh air,” the Steam store page reads.
Hong Kong 2097 is set to launch in December 2025 for PC (Steam).
