Karateka

Karateka is a 1984 martial arts action game designed and programmed by Jordan Mechner? for the Apple II, his first published game and the work that preceded his creation of the Prince of Persia series.¹²¹¹ Set in feudal Japan, the game casts the player as an unnamed hero who must fight his way through the karate-trained guards of an evil warlord, Akuma, to rescue his kidnapped love interest, Princess Mariko, from the warlord’s fortress.¹²¹¹ It was published in North America by Broderbund Software? and in Europe by Ariolasoft, and became a commercial and critical success.¹²¹¹

Mechner spent about two years programming the game, working mostly in his college dorm room at Yale and in his parents’ basement, before submitting it to Broderbund on a floppy disk.¹² He has said his central goal was to create a game with fluid, lifelike character animation that would “feel like a movie” while remaining easy enough for a non-gamer to grasp the story and pick up the joystick.¹² He kept a private journal beginning in 1982, at the age of 17, chronicling the personal, creative, and technical struggles that led to the game — material later published as a book documenting his life during its development.¹²

Gameplay

The game combines side-scrolling platform elements with fighting-game combat.¹¹ As the hero ascends a mountain into Akuma’s fortress, foes appear one at a time; once in a fighting stance, the player throws punches and kicks while dodging, with a health bar at the bottom of the screen that diminishes with each hit and recovers slowly when the player refrains from combat.¹¹ Defeating an enemy requires draining its own on-screen health bar before advancing.¹¹ In addition to human guards, Akuma periodically sends a trained hawk that can be deflected with well-timed punches, and environmental hazards such as a falling portcullis or an open cliffside end the game instantly if not avoided.¹¹ Like most games of its era, it lacked checkpoints or a save function, making completion in a single sitting a considerable challenge.¹¹ Cut scenes appear throughout, showing such moments as Akuma ordering his men into action.¹¹

Cinematic technique and animation

Mechner drew directly on the silent-film techniques he was studying in his history-of-cinema classes at Yale, adapting rotoscoping, cross-cutting, and tracking shots to the Apple II.¹² The rotoscoped animation, in which character movement was traced from filmed reference, was central to the game’s realism and became its most-praised feature.¹²¹¹ It opens with a text crawl and builds to a climactic battle, a structure Raph Koster, creative lead of Ultima Online, singled out in describing it as “one of the first games that truly felt like a movie”.¹²

Contemporaries credit Karateka with pioneering conventions later taken for granted. Will Wright, lead designer of The Sims, called it “the first computer game that gave me the sense that I was seeing a new form of interactive storytelling,” praising its uncannily real characters and cinematic polish.¹² Todd Howard, producer of the games that would become the Skyrim, Oblivion, and Fallout series, stated that Mechner “invented the video game cutscene with this game” and ranked it among his top ten, calling it “way ahead of its time”.¹² David Jaffe, director of God of War, said it was “the first game to make it clear that games could be more than simple reflex, twitch tests,” demonstrating that storytelling during gameplay was both possible and powerful.¹²

Release, ports, and reception

Karateka reached retail without a marketing campaign; reviews and word-of-mouth drove sales until, in April 1985, Billboard ranked it the number-one best-selling game in the United States.¹² The game was ported widely, including to the Commodore 64, Atari home computers, the Nintendo Entertainment System, and the Game Boy, and cumulative sales eventually passed 500,000 units — a substantial figure at a time when the video game market was less than a tenth of its later size.¹² GameFAQs records a 1985 Broderbund release in both the United States and Europe, along with later European releases such as DRO Soft’s MSX and ZX Spectrum editions in 1990 and an Amstrad CPC version issued through Microids the same year.²³⁶⁹ The NES conversion was published under the Broderbund name in 1984, running about 24 kilobytes in size.¹¹ On the various home platforms it was received warmly, players recalling its color, animation, sound, cinematics, and mechanics as unusually rich for the period.¹⁴

Legacy and re-releases

The game’s warm reception helped persuade Mechner, immediately after college, to continue making games — a decision that led to Prince of Persia, which reused and refined its rotoscoped animation and cinematic presentation.¹²¹¹ A high-definition remake spearheaded by Mechner was released as a downloadable title in 2012 for the Xbox 360, Microsoft Windows, and PlayStation 3, with planned ports for iOS and the Wii U.¹¹ That remake, published by DotEmu under license from Waterwheel Licensing, was rated Teen by the Entertainment Software Rating Board and drew scores of 8 out of 10 from outlets including Machinima’s Inside Gaming and Game Informer, which praised its exceptional production values and nuanced play.¹⁵ It was sold on Save 80% on Karateka on Steam.¹⁵

In May 2013 a faithful re-release, Karateka Classic, was announced for iOS and Android, reproducing the original Apple II experience down to its simulated floppy-disk load sounds and priced at 99 cents on the App Store.⁷¹⁴ In 2023, Digital Eclipse? released The Making of Karateka, an interactive documentary that packages emulated and remastered versions of Mechner’s early games with rare design documents and audio and video interviews, released as the first entry in the studio’s Gold Master series across PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and Steam.¹²

The word “karateka” is itself a common noun borrowed from Japanese, denoting an expert in or competitor at karate, formed from karate plus the suffix -ka, “person”.¹³