Harmful Park: The Rarest Joke on the PlayStation

Right now there are listings asking over US$2,000 for Harmful Park, a PlayStation game about two sisters shooting pie at a theme park. Disc on its own, no box, no manual, still north of $450. The market has clearly lost its mind. Except I’ve spent days reading about this thing now and I sort of get it.

So what is it?

Harmful Park — ハームフルパーク — came out in Japan on Valentine’s Day 1997, made and self-published by a small studio called Sky Think System, and it never went anywhere else. It’s a cute-em-up, the Parodius end of the shmup family tree, horizontal scrolling, six stages, all of it inside a theme park that’s been hijacked. An evil scientist called Dr. Tequila has seized the place and turned it into a fortress, a rival scientist wants it back, and rather than go herself she sends her two daughters in a flying machine. Mother of the year.

The weapons are food. Four of them, swappable mid-flight — the official names, in katakana on the Japanese side, come out as the Pie Spread, slow but heavy, and the Jelly Boomerang, weak but homing, and the other two slots are ice cream and potato. Every one upgrades three times and has a limited-use secondary, so there’s a real shooter under the dessert, with score multipliers for taking out clumps of enemies in one hit. This is the thing every source agrees on, actually — it looks like a joke and plays like it was balanced by people who cared.

Why is it obscure?

Count the ways. Japan-only. Self-published by a studio nobody had heard of, with a print run to match. A 2D sprite shooter on the PlayStation in 1997 — FF7 had come out two weeks earlier, on the console that existed specifically to kill sprites. The genre was a hard sell in the West and fading at home, and this was Sky Think System’s third game, their first shooter, and their last anything. Then everyone moved on.

Except the eleven people who played it wouldn’t shut up about it, and slowly the reputation flipped. Retro Gamer put it in their 20 greatest PlayStation games nobody played (issue 137, January 2015), Eurogamer filed it among gaming’s most valuable treasures, and the price of the disc did what prices do when a game is good, tiny in number, and finished forever.

Why should anyone care?

Because the comedy is load-bearing. This isn’t a competent shooter with a funny skin, the jokes are built into the level design. One mid-boss fight crashes a wedding, and the jilted groom’s tears come at you as bullets. Hardcore Gaming 101 swears there are enemies with Jiffy Pop popping out of their chests, and a boss that turns out to be a Frankenstein’s monster piloted by a dancing cat inside its head, which the game reveals and then simply moves on from. Nothing underlines anything. The whole park keeps this up for six stages.

And the disc is generous in a way that stopped being normal. Two-player simultaneous play, plus three separate minigames — Punch Ball, a Pong variant, Sky Circuit, a split-screen racer, and a four-player Tank Battle. A tiny studio’s one shot at a shooter, and they padded it out with a party game. On a disc almost nobody bought. Man.

How to play it in 2026

• The original disc. Actual sold auctions in Japan mostly land between ¥62,000 and ¥80,000 — call it US$400–550 — and the price trackers put a complete copy around US$800. Sealed is wherever the seller’s imagination goes, the two big trackers disagree with each other by two and a half times. Whatever the true number is, it’s an NTSC-J disc, so add a Japanese console or a modded one on top.
• The official cheap way, for one more year. Japan got it on PlayStation Network’s Game Archives in 2012 for ¥617, playable on PS3, PSP and Vita. It’s still buyable with a Japanese PSN account — but Sony announced in July 2026 that the Japanese PS3 and Vita stores stop taking purchases from July 2027. The ¥617 copy of a ¥70,000 game has a use-by date. That’s very Harmful Park somehow.
• The English patch. In April 2022 a translator called Hilltop released a full English patch — not just the cutscenes, they built a tool to redraw the background art and sprites that carry text, so the visual gags land too. It’s a disc game, so per house rules that means a PlayStation emulator like DuckStation, not MAME. The emulator’s legal and ships with nothing; the game is copyrighted and sourcing it is on you.

Here’s the part that gets me. Sky Think System put a joke shooter out on Valentine’s Day, watched it sink, and closed the book. Twenty-five years later one person cared enough to redraw every Japanese sign in the park so the jokes work in English, for free, for a game whose makers never knew anyone was coming back for it. I hope someone who worked on it has seen the prices. I hope it makes them laugh.