It is a grainy, black-and-white image of a corpse.
There are no flashy graphics or "Try Again" buttons. Just a static photo of a man lying on a floor, riddled with what look like bullet wounds, accompanied by a somber, low-quality loop of music. If you grew up in the era of 16-bit consoles, you expected Mario falling off a cliff or Link collapsing in a puff of smoke. You didn't expect actual death. Yet, the Hong Kong 97 game over screen remains one of the most infamous artifacts in retrogaming history, specifically because it broke every rule of what a commercial video game was supposed to be.
The game itself is barely a game. Developed by HappySoft and released in 1995 for the Super Famicom via a floppy disk peripheral, it’s a "kusoge"—a Japanese term literally meaning "crap game." You play as Chin, a caricature of Bruce Lee, tasked with wiping out the entire population of mainland China. It’s crude. It’s offensive. But the game over screen shifted the conversation from "bad game" to "genuine mystery."
What is the Hong Kong 97 game over screen actually showing?
For decades, the internet was convinced this was a real photo of a dead body. In the early days of 4chan and creepypasta forums, rumors flew that the developer, Kowloon Kurosawa, had used a photo of a real-life murder victim or a victim of the Bosnian War.
The truth is actually more grounded, though no less morbid.
The man in the photo is Leszek Błażyński, a Polish boxer who won bronze medals in the 1972 and 1976 Olympics. Błażyński struggled with depression later in life and, tragically, took his own life in August 1992. The image used in the game is a still from a news report or documentary covering his death. It wasn't a victim of a war or a random crime—it was a world-class athlete in his final, most vulnerable moment, repurposed for a homebrew video game without any regard for ethics or copyright.
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Kurosawa eventually admitted in a 2018 interview with South China Morning Post that the game was meant to be a satirical middle finger to the game industry. He wanted to make the worst, most tasteless thing possible. Using a real photo of a deceased person as the Hong Kong 97 game over screen was the ultimate way to ensure the game felt "forbidden."
The music that won't stop
If the image doesn't get to you, the audio will. The game features a five-second loop of a song called "I Love Beijing Tiananmen." In the actual levels, it's upbeat and annoying. When you hit the game over screen, the loop continues, but the context changes. It becomes a repetitive, maddening dirge. There is no escape from it unless you hit the reset button. Most SNES games have a "Game Over" theme that lasts maybe ten seconds. This one lasts until the end of time—or until you lose your mind.
Why this image bypassed Nintendo's strict sensors
How did this happen? Nintendo was the king of censorship in the 90s. They famously turned blood into "sweat" in Mortal Kombat and removed religious symbols from The Legend of Zelda.
The reason the Hong Kong 97 game over screen exists is that it was never officially licensed.
HappySoft didn't go through the Nintendo Seal of Quality process. They didn't send carts to Redmond, Washington, for approval. Instead, they sold the game on floppy disks for devices like the Super Wild Card or the Game Doctor. These were copiers that allowed users to play pirated games or homebrew titles. Because it was distributed underground, Kurosawa could put whatever he wanted on that screen.
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- No ESRB: The game was released just as rating systems were becoming standard, but since it was a bootleg, it ignored them.
- Direct Sales: Kurosawa sold these himself, often through mail-order or in the back of computer magazines.
- Digital Files: The image is a low-resolution scan. On a CRT television in 1995, it looked incredibly raw and "snuff-film-adjacent," which fueled the urban legends.
It’s easy to forget how isolated we were before the high-speed internet. If you found this game in a shop in Hong Kong or Japan in the mid-90s, you had no way to "fact check" the image. You just saw a dead body on your TV screen and wondered if you were in trouble.
The legacy of the most cursed screen in gaming
The internet loves a mystery. The Hong Kong 97 game over screen became a staple of early YouTube thanks to creators like the Angry Video Game Nerd (James Rolfe). His 2014 review of the game catapulted it from an obscure Japanese oddity to a global meme.
But beneath the memes, there's a weird artistic nihilism at play.
Most games want you to keep playing. They want to sell you a sequel. Hong Kong 97 feels like it hates the player. The game over screen isn't a "try again" prompt; it's a dead end. It’s a reminder of mortality in a medium that is usually about infinite lives and power fantasies. It’s also a snapshot of a very specific time in Hong Kong's history—the anxiety surrounding the 1997 handover to China. While the game is a joke, that anxiety was very real, and the "dead body" screen sort of functions as a dark, cynical punchline to the political tension of the era.
Honestly, the most shocking thing about the game today isn't the gore—we've seen way worse in Resident Evil or The Last of Us. It’s the sheer audacity of using a real person's tragedy for a throwaway joke. It’s a level of "edge" that even modern indie developers rarely touch.
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Identifying the Błażyński photo
For years, people scanned through archives of the Balkan wars looking for this man. It wasn't until the late 2010s that dedicated internet sleuths on Reddit and specialized gaming forums cross-referenced the posture and the surrounding furniture with Polish news archives. The discovery of Leszek Błażyński’s identity didn't make the screen any less creepy, but it did strip away the supernatural "cursed" aura. It replaced it with the reality of a man who was a hero in his country, whose image was stolen for a tasteless parody.
How to experience it (if you must)
If you're looking to find the Hong Kong 97 game over screen yourself, you don't need a Super Famicom and an expensive floppy drive.
- Emulation: Most SNES emulators run the ROM perfectly. It’s only about 1MB.
- Web Archives: Since the game is essentially abandonware and a historical curiosity, it’s hosted on various archive sites.
- Video Clips: You can find the 10-hour loops of the game over screen on YouTube. It's the "lo-fi beats to study to" of the underworld.
When you see it, look at the bottom right of the image. You can see a bit of the floor and what looks like a leg of a table. The composition is haunting because it's so mundane. It looks like a photo your neighbor would take, not a professional artist. That "amateur" quality is exactly why it sticks in your brain.
Actionable steps for the curious
If you're researching this for a project or just out of a morbid fascination with "lost" media, here is how you should approach it:
- Research the Context: Read up on the 1997 handover of Hong Kong. It explains why the game exists. Without that political backdrop, the game is just nonsense. With it, it’s a very dark piece of protest art.
- Verify the Sources: Don't trust the old "creepypasta" wikis that claim the body is a developer who died during production. That’s been thoroughly debunked. Stick to the SCMP interview with Kurosawa for the most accurate information.
- Check the Peripheral History: Look into the "Super Wild Card" device. It's a fascinating piece of 90s hardware that allowed this whole subculture of unauthorized games to thrive.
- Mind the Ethics: Remember that the man in the photo was a real person with a family. While the game treats him like a prop, the actual history of Leszek Błażyński is one of athletic excellence and a tragic end.
The screen remains a relic of an era when the digital world was still a "Wild West." There were no filters, no corporate oversight, and no easy way to find the truth. It’s a pixelated nightmare that shouldn't exist, yet it's burned into the collective memory of the internet forever.