While you're listening to this loop (you have plenty of time to do so), you can read a short story about the original song.
The game's "main theme" is a short loop of the song "I Love Beijing Tiananmen" (我爱北京天安门), a Chinese patriotic folk song. The original composition praises the Tiananmen Square and Chairman Mao, and it has been a widely known song in China since its creation. The version used in Hong Kong 97 is a low-quality, distorted sample of a Japanese karaoke rendition of the song. It plays on an endless loop throughout the game, adding to the surreal and chaotic nature of the experience.
As for why this specific track ended up in the game, Hong Kong 97 was developed by Yoshihisa "Kowloon" Kurosawa, a Japanese journalist and amateur game developer. The game was created quickly, with little attention to legal or artistic standards, as part of an experiment to make an outrageous and provocative product. Kurosawa likely included the music as a satirical or ironic commentary, reflecting the game's bizarre and politically charged themes surrounding the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China.
The mismatched and repetitive nature of the music, coupled with the game's infamous lack of quality, has cemented it as a cult classic in the world of bad video games.
Is the music still playing while you were reading this? Good.
