Check our Digital Eclipse Bundle! Purchase The Making of Karateka together with Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord.
Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner was a college student when he created one of the biggest-selling games of 1984: Karateka. Now, in a new interactive documentary...
Check our Digital Eclipse Bundle! Purchase The Making of Karateka together with Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord.
Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner was a college student when he created one of the biggest-selling games of 1984: Karateka. Now, in a new interactive documentary from Digital Eclipse, the story of how a teenager with an Apple II created one of the most groundbreaking, influential games of all time.
THE ORIGIN STORY OF A LEGENDARY GAME CREATOR
Discover how Karateka was made through an exhaustive archive of design documents, playable prototypes, and all-new video features. Like walking through a museum, you can explore the interactive timelines at your own pace.
PLAY THE ACCLAIMED ORIGINALS
Enjoy pixel-perfect versions of the original Karateka games and a variety of never-before-seen early prototypes, with rich quality-of-life features like save anywhere, rewind, chapter select, and director's commentary.
TWO REMASTERED GAMES
Karateka Remastered is an all-new version of the original game featuring cutting-room-floor content, commentary, achievements, and more. Deathbounce: Rebounded is a fast and frantic twin-stick shooter based on Jordan's unpublished prototype.
A GROUNDBREAKING MASTERPIECE
Discover how Karateka became one of the first games to include cinematic scenes, a moving original soundtrack, rotoscoped animation, and a Hollywood-style love story, influencing the decades of games that followed.
THE GOLD MASTER SERIES
New from Digital Eclipse (TMNT: The Cowabunga Collection, Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration), the Gold Master Series presents iconic games in an innovative "interactive documentary" format, putting the shared history of games and their creators into one comprehensive package.
While The Making of Karateka doesn't have every single version of Karateka included, it does have the "holy trinity" of Apple II, C64 and Atari versions, and has many playable prototypes, videos, documents and photos to give you a through understanding of how Jordan Mechner came to creating his breakout 1984 game. Best of all, the 2023 reimagining of the game is top notch and means just about anyone can now experience this early foray into cinematic games on PC.
As someone who never played the original, I'm finding this really interesting--it's a great retelling of Mechner's creative process.
While I'm still working my way through this interactive documentary, I've found the playable versions of Mechner's earlier games particularly interesting, and I *love* that I can just sit back and watch an emulated "recording" of someone else playing, while being able to jump in at any time.
There's a few quibbles I have, though:
* There doesn't seem to be any way to show only what you *haven't* yet seen in a particular chapter. I thought I saw everything in the "Deathbounce" chapter, but it says I've only seen 89%, and I have no idea what I missed.
* The UI really seems made for controllers, and everything feels awkward with a keyboard and mouse--kind of like one of those weirdly-ported console game that maps buttons to keys on opposite sides of the keyboard, making it difficult to use with one hand on the keyboard and the other on the mouse. Sometimes there appears to be no way to do things with just a mouse, including exiting the application.
* The game sometimes immediately exits when run from GOG Galaxy (see the GOG forum for this game for more details). From what I can tell, disabling the GOG Overlay appears to have fixed this so far (fingers crossed), but it's still a frustrating bug.
‘The Making of Karateka’ is an intersection of two niche subjects in video gaming: video game preservation and Jordan Mechner. Although Mechner is one of the first video game auteurs, pioneered use of cinematic techniques in video games, and made ‘Prince of Persia’, he’s not often mentioned.
Despite my appreciation for Mechner, I’ve never played ‘Karateka’ and was ignorant of its significance. ‘TMoK’ is an interactive documentary on the making of the game. It also covers Mechner’s first and unpublished game, ‘Deathbounce’, and how it led to the creation of ‘Karateka’. ‘TMoK’’s success as a documentary is greatly due to the vast amount of notes and concept materials that Mechner had kept, which he made available to the documentarians.
The documentary includes video interviews with industry veterans, excerpts from Mechner’s journals, scanned documents, and digital replica of game disks and boxes. A special highlight is interviews with Mechner’s father, who composed the game’s soundtrack. I do wish there were more interviews with Mechner himself though.
‘TMoK’ also includes playable prototypes of ‘Deathbounce’ and ‘Karateka’, as well as the Apple II, C64 and Atari 8-bit versions of the latter game. Of course, there’re the remastered versions of both games, made by Digital Eclipse. ‘Karateka Remastered’ includes previously excluded elements, giving it a new level of polish and challenge.
Both remasters have a nice balance of the originals’ spirit and modern sensibilities. I love how the graphics weren’t updated to look like modern games, but made to resemble the original using a bigger colour palette. ‘Karateka’ looks really nice as a VGA game.
‘TMoK’ is informative and interesting, made better by the various versions of the games that players can play. This title may be niche, but is important in preserving video game history. So, ‘TMok’ (especially in DRM-free form) is worthy of your support. I hope at some point, ‘Prince of Persia’ will get the same treatment.
I played the NES version and loved the game when I was little, didn't even knew that my version was one of the worst.
Having played this and experience all the documentary, one can have a new appreciation to the game and it's history.
The secret game, is almost worth it all on it's own.
Digital Eclipse did a fantastic job with this, didn't experience bugs nor any glitches.
This was an amazing game back in the day! I played it on my C64, and it could be a little tough towards the end.
I remember the first time I got to the princess at the end you had to save, and I approached her in combat stance... (Her outstretched arms going down should've been my first clue, lol!)
I won't spoil it for those who don't know. :D
