Hopang Man

The Japanese manga “Ampamman” about a superhero baked from bread by a kind baker and fighting against the invasion of Earth by contagious alien bacteria under the command of the evil Baikinman, is one of the most famous works of mass culture in the Land of the Rising Sun. The character was invented by children’s writer Takashi Yanase back in 1968, and twenty years later it gained nationwide popularity in connection with the release of the anime animated series of the same name; at the same time, some critics called it (and not without reason) “terrifying”, because in some episodes (as well as in the source stories) Ampamman, taking pity on starving children, fed them with his own body, and then returned to his creator, Uncle Jem, so that he “finished” the lost parts – you will agree that this sounds, to put it mildly, wild. But one way or another, in neighboring South Korea, this fictional universe (in which, by the way, there are almost 2000 – two thousand – characters!) had already gained even greater popularity by the early 1990s. In the period from 1998 to 2001, a tetralogy of full-fledged commercial platformers called “Narara Hoppangman” was released there – but much earlier, back in 1993, a group of high school students who called themselves “Hacker Studio” and were equally fond of both the animated series about this character released in their country at that time, and programming, decided to create their own game about Ampamman – of course, in the genre of platform arcade and free. That first version has not survived (or was deliberately not made publicly available): mankind has only an improved version of 1996. All text, limited, however, to a few words in the menu and during the gameplay, is in English.