International Karate
68% from CRASH, five stars from Sinclair User, and recalled from America
System 3's 1985 fighting game took on Way of the Exploding Fist and split the critics down the middle — CRASH gave it 68%, Sinclair User gave it five out of five. In America it was published by Epyx as World Karate Championship, and a US court ordered both versions recalled in 1987.
International Karate was System 3’s answer to Way of the Exploding Fist, released in 1985 and advertised with the confidence of a company that knew what it was up against: “you thought you’d seen a Karate game… as you know, like the martial arts, perfection is the only accepted standard, so play nothing until you play System 3’s International Karate.”
Its sequel, International Karate+, is the one usually remembered. The original is the more interesting document.
Fast facts
- Publisher: System 3, of London SE1. Released: 1985.
- Platforms: Spectrum, C64, Amstrad CPC, Atari 8-bit.
- CRASH: 68%, issue 24.
- In America: published by Epyx as World Karate Championship, with Activision separately due to publish it under its own name.
The critics could not agree
International Karate produced one of the sharper splits of the period.
CRASH: 68%. Sinclair User: five out of five.
That is not a small gap, and it is about a game now remembered as a classic of the British 8-bit catalogue. Two magazines with the same readership, reviewing the same cassette within weeks of each other, reached opposite conclusions — one placing it below average, the other at the top of its scale.
It is worth holding on to whenever a period score is quoted as though it settled something. The reviewer’s verdict was one opinion in a market that had not yet agreed what a fighting game was supposed to do, and Way of the Exploding Fist had only established the genre a few months earlier.
Recalled from America
The game’s American history is a mess that had nothing to do with System 3.
In the United States it was published by Epyx as World Karate Championship. Data East then sued Epyx — not over System 3’s game as such, but over that version’s resemblance to Data East’s arcade game Karate Champ.
On 10 June 1987, US District Court Judge William Ingram ruled that Epyx must cease reproduction and marketing, and
recall all copies of both World Karate Championship and International Karate from all distributors, jobbers, representatives, and retailers.
The judge held the two games “substantially similar” and “qualitatively identical in every respect”.
So a British game was pulled from the American market by a judgment in a dispute between a Japanese-owned publisher and an American one. System 3 appears in the order only as the name on the other box.
⚠ This library holds the report of the June 1987 ruling and nothing on what became of it afterwards. Copyright judgments of this kind were not always final; treat the injunction as the documented event rather than the end of the story.
See also
- International Karate+ — the 1988 Spectrum sequel.
- System 3
- Way of the Exploding Fist — the game it was made to beat.
- Sinclair ZX Spectrum