International Karate | Code Like It's 198x

International Karate spent 1985 trying to catch up. In July, as Melbourne House’s The Way of the Exploding Fist headed for the top of the charts, Mark Cale’s London publisher System 3 said its own karate game would be ready “any day”. It did not reach the shops until the end of the year. Its advertisements told readers “you thought you’d seen a Karate game”. CRASH’s reviewer replied that he had: “it’s called Way of the Exploding Fist and it’s better than this.”

The game’s most interesting life was elsewhere. Archer Maclean, the author of Dropzone, rewrote it from scratch for the Commodore 64, and his version went to America as Epyx’s World Karate Championship. There it became the subject of a copyright case that went to the federal appeal court.

Fast facts

Publisher: System 3, Southbank House, Black Prince Road, London SE1.
Released: late 1985 in Britain (Spectrum, £6.50); the Commodore 64 version followed in 1986.
Platforms: ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC and Atari 8-bit.
Commodore 64 and Atari versions: Archer Maclean, with music on the C64 by Rob Hubbard.
Reviews: CRASH 68% (Spectrum); Sinclair User five stars (Spectrum).
In America: published by Epyx as World Karate Championship from 30 April 1986.
Sequel: International Karate + (1987).

The game

Two karateka, one in white and one in red, fight three 30-second rounds under a judge who shouts “begin” in synthesised speech, with the word printed in a speech bubble in case you missed it. A clean blow scores a full point, a scrappy one half a point, and the first to two full points takes the round. Between bouts come bonus screens: kicking through a stack of wooden blocks, then punching and kicking away objects thrown from both sides of the screen. Win, and the tournament moves on to another city. On the Spectrum the backdrops include Rio, New York, London and Sydney, with a different set on each side of the tape. Each fighter has 16 punches and kicks, eight with the fire button held and eight without.

Two reviews, one comparison

Both Spectrum magazines reviewed it in January 1986, and both measured it against Exploding Fist. CRASH gave it 68%. Its reviewers praised the speech, “the best I’ve heard”, and the backdrops, but found the animation “a lot cruder than Fist”, with fewer frames and a flickery look. The computer opponent was easy to beat once the controls were learned. “Disappointing overall, given the wait,” the verdict ran.

Sinclair User gave it five stars and came close to calling it a draw. Exploding Fist had “the slight edge in animation design”, but International Karate had “the best backdrops”, and at £6.50 it cost over £2 less. “Had it been released first we would have given it a Classic award,” the magazine said, and it advised readers to see both before choosing, “but one of the two ought to be on everybody’s shopping list this Christmas.” Buyers agreed: by February it was at number six in Sinclair User’s Spectrum chart.

Archer Maclean’s Commodore 64 version

Maclean told the story to Retro Gamer years later. In about August 1985 System 3 asked him to write some C64 graphics routines for a karate game whose original programmer and artist had walked out. He thought the early Spectrum work “really dire” and had no interest in converting it. After a trip to a pub with an arcade karate machine in it, he was “more or less asked” to make something like it. “I played it for five minutes and simply thought I could do a much more fluid quality job if I just redid everything myself.” He built the new game on the game shell from his Dropzone, drew his own backdrops and animation, and wrote tools to set the offsets of each frame so that “the knuckle of a hitter” would “strike the actual nose pixel of the opponent”.

ZZAP!64 reviewed the result in June 1986. “Comparisons to Way of the Exploding Fist are quite frankly unavoidable,” one reviewer wrote. “International Karate is a bit similar, but it is a damn sight better.” Another singled out the computer opponent, which could no longer be beaten “time after time by using the same move”, and the long Rob Hubbard piece that played throughout. Not everyone liked the music: in October that year Greg Barnett, who designed Exploding Fist, told ZZAP! that it sounded like Hubbard’s Thing on a Spring “slowed down”.

World Karate Championship and the Data East case

Epyx took a licence from System 3 and on 30 April 1986 began selling Maclean’s Commodore version in the United States as World Karate Championship. Data East, whose arcade game Karate Champ had come out in 1984, sued Epyx for copyright, trademark and trade dress infringement. System 3 was not a party to the case.

The trial was held in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. Judge William Ingram rejected the trademark and trade dress claims, but found in January 1987 that Epyx had infringed Data East’s copyright. On 10 June 1987, Computer Gaming World’s Computer Game Forum reported, he ordered Epyx to stop making and selling World Karate Championship, to stop distributing International Karate, and to recall all copies of both “from all distributors, jobbers, representatives, and retailers”. He held the two games “substantially similar”, and the appeal court later summarised his finding: apart from Epyx’s graphics, part of the scoreboard, the referee’s appearance and details of the bonus rounds, the games were “qualitatively identical”.

Epyx appealed, and on 30 November 1988 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the ruling. The district court had listed fifteen things the games shared, from fourteen moves each and a referee who says “begin” and “stop” in a speech balloon to 30-second rounds and 100 bonus points per remaining second. The appeal court held that all of them “necessarily follow from the idea of a martial arts karate combat game”, or came from the limits of the Commodore 64, and so could not be protected. As the district court itself had put it, karate “is not susceptible of a wholly fanciful presentation”. What Data East did own, the scoreboard and the background scenes, was not enough: the backgrounds were “quite dissimilar”, and the district court had found that Karate Champ’s buyers averaged 17.5 years old, so “a discerning 17.5 year-old boy could not regard the works as substantially similar.” The court sent the case back with orders to lift the injunction.

The British side saw the case differently. Maclean said he had not known about the lawsuit until a call came from America asking why his game looked so like Karate Champ, and he pointed out that any game with two players in red and white karate suits, fighting timed bouts under karate rules, “is bound to look similar”. Mark Cale told the Italian magazine K in January 1989 that he saw it as a personal matter between Data East and Epyx: the fighters and moves were different, but there is not much you can do differently in a karate game.