Terrifying 9/11

released on Dec 31, 2002
by Hitek

Terrifying 9/11 is a Game Boy Color game released some time after the 9/11 attacks by Hitek in Taiwan. The game is an unlicensed port of Metal Slug 1.


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Game Review - originally written by Sardius

God bless Taiwanese pirates. I mean, seriously. Without them, where would we be? Would you even WANT to live in a world where King of Casino and Jurassic Boy 2 didn’t exist? No, you wouldn’t. Trust me.

Anyway, this “pirate original” Gameboy game follows in the grand Sachen tradition by offering ripped-off, shaky gameplay accompanied by horrible, horrible music. In this case, the game being ripped off is SNK/Nazca’s Metal Slug…which is actually kinda neat, because there hasn’t been an official Metal Slug game released for the Gameboy as of yet. This particular bastardized incarnation of the series even goes as far as to rip graphics directly from the Neo Geo Pocket versions of Metal Slug, for that extra desperate stab at legitimacy! Unfortunately, ripping off the series’ uniquely awesome gameplay apparently wasn’t as easy for whoever made this, since the game pretty much plays like crap. Oh well. It’s still a neat enough little oddity, I guess.
(editor's note: check out my review on this same Backloggd page I'm pretty proud of that one)

this happened to my buddy ibrahim

Utterly reprehensible backwater terrorists living in the Sahara desert still put in more effort towards impressively porting Metal Slug to the GBC than any Squenix “remaster” port

Probably the best conversation piece in my collection, which is saying a lot, Terrifying 9/11 is a strange work of heated anti-imperialist schadenfreude gestating a surprisingly competent Metal Slug port for Game Boy Color that outdoes its Neo-Geo Pocket Color siblings in terms of faithfulness to the original game
Some speculate, based solely off the game's remarkable adherence to its source material, that this may have been an official port from Takara (who made numerous SNK ports for GBC) that got canceled, and I can definitely see that
The dialogue is incredibly tone-deaf, especially because this came out in 2002, but it's precisely its status as a cursed artifact that makes it interesting
It's the kind of thing that feels like it should only exist as deliberate satire, like somebody made a video game out of an article from The Onion, but yet this game bafflingly occupies the status of being naïve camp, and not deliberate
It's a weird sight as an American who lived through its cultural shockwaves in the haziest fog of early memory, who knows people who were personally impacted by this tragedy, to imagine the people who created this in 2002, a room full of people so far removed from the national trauma that shaped multiple generations that they found it fit to use our seismic cataclysm as gag gift wrapping for a (probably) laundered incomplete prototype game?
Who can forget Osama bin Laden himself telling GWB "I DIDN'T DO THE ATTACKS. NO EVIDENCE."? and then having that juxtaposed with a shockingly faithful rendition of one of the best run-n-gun games ever made, on a platform where it shouldn't exist, on top of knowing that this isn't some rom hack or another form of satire but rather a real commercial product somebody found fit to sell on store shelves?
Don't mean to be disrespectful towards people who were impacted by 9/11, rather, I think this game's existence makes some sort of point on just how quickly 9/11 entered a purgatorial state of existing as a cultural unreality. 9/11 became realer than real, for us it redefined the boundaries between private and public for the next century, the rest of us rebuilding our cities and psyches around the negative space the towers left, for them, they were so far removed from it that within a year they laughed at us, or, if you prefer, were so far removed from our psychic scars that 9/11 was just another brand to capitalize from them, either way, this game was immaculately conceived by the anonymous cultural subconscious in some twisted act of hyperreality, outside the mortal bounds of good taste, and copyright, trauma, and visible intent.
Worth 70 bucks to me, when faced with the financial choice between a new-in-box next gen game and...this, the choice is obvious, 4/5 would "buy off an obscure regional competitor to eBay in a country I don't live in" again
Limited Run wouldn't have the balls to reprint this lmao