Karateka | Code Like It's 198x

Karateka looks at first like one more karate game of the mid-1980s: a man in a white gi walks to the right and fights one guard after another. What set it apart was the way the figures moved. Jordan Mechner, a teenage student at Yale, had filmed a karate teacher on Super 8 and traced the footage into an Apple II, so the fighters stepped, bowed, kicked and fell like people. He also borrowed from the cinema, cutting away from the hero to show the warlord in his palace, as a silent film cuts between rescuer and captive. Brøderbund published it in 1984, and it sold more than half a million copies before Mechner turned the same methods to Prince of Persia.

Fast facts

Designer and programmer: Jordan Mechner, on the Apple II.
Publisher: Brøderbund, 1984; in Britain, Ariolasoft.
Price: $34.95 for the Apple II and $29.95 for the Commodore 64 in America (Enter, May 1985); £9.95 on cassette and £12.95 on disk for the Commodore 64 in Britain (Zzap!64, November 1985).
Animation: rotoscoped from Super 8 film.
Other versions: Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bit (both by Robert Cook), then the Atari ST, IBM PC, Atari 7800 and the Famicom in Japan.
Sales: more than 500,000 copies, according to Retro Gamer.

A student’s game

Mechner’s first submission to Brøderbund, a shoot-’em-up called Deathbounce, was turned down. Then he saw the company’s new best-seller, Choplifter. “Here was a game that went beyond arcade-style racking up points to depict a human, dramatic situation,” he told Retro Gamer in 2013. “Choplifter inspired me to make a game that would be even more cinematic. And that led to Karateka.” He drew on Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, Hokusai’s woodblock prints, Bruce Lee films, Disney animation, and D. W. Griffith’s silent films, which “used cross-cutting to create suspense”. He was taking karate lessons at the time.

He wrote it while studying at Yale. Asked how he balanced the two, he said: “Not very well. It’s a miracle that I actually graduated.” The hardest part was finishing: “Karateka was the biggest project of any kind I’d taken on. It took two and a half years to finish.” The whole game had to fit in the Apple II’s 48K of memory, a constraint that he said “influenced every aspect of the game design”, and which later made it easier to convert to smaller machines.

The turning point came when he gave up drawing the frames by hand, which “just looked like programmer animation”. Mechner has described the filming in slightly different words over the years: to Retro Gamer he spoke of filming his mother’s karate teacher, and to Wireframe in 2020 of “my karate teacher doing the punches and kicks that would be needed for the game”. He also filmed his father running and climbing onto the bonnet of a car, to stand in for climbing a cliff. Super 8 film ran for only a couple of minutes a roll, so every wasted take cost money (see rotoscoping).

Brøderbund’s Gary Carlston said he first turned the game down “because it didn’t seem to have much gameplay”. It filled an empty monitor on the company’s stand at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, drew a crowd and was signed. It was on Computer Gaming World‘s readers’ poll by January 1985.

Playing it

The hero arrives at the mountain fortress of the warlord Akuma, who has taken Princess Mariko prisoner. He fights his way through the gate, across the courtyard and along the corridors, meeting guards who grow stronger and each fight differently. The player can walk, run, or stand in a fighting stance, and in the stance throw punches and kicks at three heights, high, middle and low. Both fighters’ energy is shown along the bottom of the screen; it drains with every blow and slowly refills if you back away. Between fights the game cuts to Akuma’s room, where he points a guard towards the door, and he also sends his eagle to swoop at the hero on the way. At the end come Akuma himself, and the princess’s cell.

The game punishes carelessness. Running into a guard without first taking up a fighting stance gets you knocked down with a single blow, as Zzap!64 warned; Antic’s reviewer added that you could bow to an opponent, but should “be sure to assume the fighting position before he moves to attack or it will be a very fast game”. The last trap is at the very end. Approach Mariko still in a fighting stance and she kills you with one kick. Zzap!64 hinted at it without giving it away: “Oh, and don’t forget your royal etiquette either…!”

Reviews

Enter’s reviewers in May 1985 found “beautiful graphics, superb animation and realistic sound effects”, and passed on Brøderbund’s claim that “the screams were made by a black belt master, digitized and then transferred to disk”. By July 1985 Karateka was second in the entertainment chart of Billboard’s software best-sellers, which COMPUTE! reprinted.

The Atari version impressed ANALOG Computing’s Patrick J. Kelley in January 1986. He praised “the finest animation and character design in any game, arcade or otherwise”, a scrolling courtyard with “the snow-capped peak far off in the distance”, and called it “one of the best all-around products to be written for the Atari since its inception”. Antic’s David Plotkin, two months later, found the animation “amazingly realistic, right down to the swishing of the robes as you throw a kick or a punch”, but complained that the joystick was slow to respond and that you were “basically just fighting one opponent after another”.

British reviewers met the Commodore 64 version in November 1985, published by Ariolasoft, and disagreed about its speed. Computer and Video Games called it “graphically brilliant”, with scrolling that was “slick and silky smooth”, and gave it 10 out of 10 for graphics. Zzap!64 found the same game slow. “It’s so slow it’s almost like playing a dream!” wrote Julian Rignall, though he still found it “fun to play”, and his colleague, who had seen the Apple version two years earlier, thought the Commodore conversion “doesn’t carry quite the same impact”. The magazine gave it 80%, praising the “movie” intermissions. Computer and Video Games also wondered whether it had come too late, and doubted that it could “challenge the supremacy of The Way of the Exploding Fist”.

Conversions

Mechner knew that the game’s fortunes depended on its conversions. “With Karateka, I was lucky to have Robert Cook do both the Commodore 64 and Atari 400/800 ports,” he told Retro Gamer, calling Cook “a rare programmer who was also a game creator in his own right”. His father, the composer of the game’s music, re-orchestrated it for the Commodore and Atari machines, “to take advantage of the better sound capability”. Versions for the Atari ST and the IBM PC were in American mail-order lists by 1987, and there was a cartridge for the Atari 7800. In Japan, according to later sources, Soft Pro converted it for the Famicom in 1985.

In July 1985 CRASH expected a Spectrum version from US Gold, but no review of one appeared in the Spectrum press.

Legacy

Karateka’s success paid for what came next. Mechner’s next game combined, he said, “the fluid action and presentation of Karateka” with a puzzle game, and became Prince of Persia (1989), rotoscoped this time from video of his brother. According to Retro Gamer, a young John Romero wrote to Mechner to tell him Karateka was a “tremendous job”. Eric Chahi thought of the mechanics of Another World as something between Karateka and Impossible Mission.

Mechner kept a journal from 1982, when he was a 17-year-old first-year student, and in 2012 published the entries that cover the game as The Making of Karateka: Journals 1982–1985. The same year a remake of Karateka, developed by Liquid Entertainment, came out for modern consoles, PC and phones, and in 2013 the original was reissued for iOS and Android as Karateka Classic, which Retro Gamer scored 86%. In August 2023 Digital Eclipse released The Making of Karateka, an interactive documentary built around the Apple II and Commodore 64 versions, early prototypes, Mechner’s journals and design documents, and a remastered edition of the game. The game’s original source code has not been published.

Sources

Enter vol. 2 no. 7, May 1985, p. 6: review (prices; the animation and sound; the black-belt screams).
Computer Gaming World issue 20, January 1985: readers’ poll listing Karateka.
COMPUTE! September 1985, p. 67: “Hotware” best-sellers reprinted from Billboard, data as of 6 July 1985 (Karateka second among entertainment titles).
Patrick J. Kelley, ANALOG Computing issue 38, January 1986, p. 41: Atari review (Brøderbund, 48K disk, $29.95).
David Plotkin, Antic vol. 4 no. 11, March 1986, p. 79: Atari review ($29.95; bowing and the fighting stance; the joystick).
Zzap!64 issue 7, November 1985, p. 102: Commodore 64 review (Ariolasoft/Brøderbund, £9.95 cassette, £12.95 disk; the controls, energy bars, eagle and intermissions; Julian Rignall’s comments; 80%).
Computer and Video Games issue 49, November 1985, p. 20: Commodore 64 review (Ariolasoft, £9.95).
CRASH issue 18, July 1985, p. 9: news of an expected Spectrum version from US Gold.
David Crookes, “In the chair: Jordan Mechner”, Retro Gamer issue 112, March 2013, pp. 90–95: Deathbounce and Choplifter; his influences; Yale; two and a half years; 48K; rotoscoping and his mother’s karate teacher; Robert Cook’s ports and his father’s music; the 500,000 copies; John Romero’s letter; the 2012 remake.
Retro Gamer issue 117, August 2013, p. 102: Karateka Classic for iOS and Android (86%).
“Turning back time”, Wireframe issue 37, April 2020, pp. 18–20: filming Karateka on Super 8.
Mike Bevan, “From the archives: Broderbund”, Retro Gamer Collection volume 6, 2012: Gary Carlston on turning the game down and the Consumer Electronics Show (see Brøderbund).
COMPUTE!’s Atari ST vol. 2 no. 4, April 1987, p. 35, and COMPUTE!’s PC Magazine issue 1, September 1987, p. 55: mail-order listings of the Atari ST and PC versions. Digital Press issue 8, November 1992, p. 5: Karateka for the Atari 7800.
Jordan Mechner, “Karateka” and “The Making of Karateka” pages, jordanmechner.com (web, secondary): the journals from 1982 and the 2012 remake by Liquid Entertainment. https://www.jordanmechner.com/en/games-movies/karateka/ and https://www.jordanmechner.com/en/books/the-making-of-karateka/
“How Digital Eclipse set the standard for preserving video game classics with their first Gold Master Series title”, Xbox Wire, 29 August 2023 (web, secondary): The Making of Karateka. https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2023/08/29/gold-master-series-the-making-of-karateka/
Wikipedia, “Karateka (video game)” (web, secondary): the Famicom version by Soft Pro (1985) and the princess’s fatal kick. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karateka_(video_game)