According to an interview published by the South China Morning Post, Yoshihisa "Kowloon" Kurosawa stated that the game came to be because he wanted to make the worst game possible as a mockery to the game industry at the time, being completely dominated by Nintendo and Sega. Since Kurosawa wasn't proficient in his programming skills, he had an anonymous Enix employee help him out, with the game being made in two days.

After completion, Kurosawa made some merchandise through articles written under pseudonyms for underground gaming magazines, and set up a mail-order service to sell the game.

For years there was speculation over the source and identity of the dead man featured on the title's game over screen. Popular theories included Polish boxer Leszek Błażyński, Palestine activist Atef Bseiso, and Egyptian author Farag Foda. The actual source was identified in 2019. It is a still from the Japanese shockumentary Death File: Yellow, depicting an unidentified man killed during the Bosnian War in 1992.

The goal of the game's story is to kill the 1.2 billion Red Communists that invaded Hong Kong. However, it is practically impossible to achieve that goal normally in-game due to Chin having only one hit point, the fact that the score meter will visually loop back to 1000 after reaching 8888 points making it hard to tell what your actual score is (this could be due in part to the number 9 being nonexistent in the game's score counter), and that, hypothetically, if you killed one enemy per second (while also accounting for the extra time it takes to defeat the game's only boss, Tong Shau Ping, multiple times), it would take around 38 years to reach a score of 1.2 billion in one sitting. The only quick way to reach a score of 1.2 billion is to cheat by manually changing the score value in a memory scanner/debugger. Doing this makes the score counter stop properly displaying the score, and causes the continuously looping theme song "I Love Beijing Tiananmen" to stop playing due to that high of a score overloading the game's memory.