The video game industry is bigger and better than ever, but it wouldn’t be to the standard it is today without the contributions of games from the past. Perhaps one of the most significant is Karateka, a side-scrolling martial arts adventure game from 1984.

Digital Eclipse, the studio that brought the Atari catalogue back into the light with Atari 50, has done it again with The Making of Karateka, an interactive documentary capturing a significant player in the history of gaming.

Originally released on Apple II in 1984 as an 8-bit home computer game, Karateka was the brainchild of Yale student Jordan Mechner, who would later go on to create the absolute classic banger, Prince of Persia. The Making of Karateka sets out to explore Mechner’s journey from child prodigy to pro game developer.

Digital Eclipse has meticulously dug through archival footage and presented it in a chapter-based timeline filled with game design documents, commentary from Mechner himself and developers including Tom Hall, the founder of id Software, and Mortal Kombat designer, John Tobias, as well as various music demos, playable prototypes and more.

I was not familiar with Karateka as it was well before my time. Still, after experiencing The Making of Karateka, I understood just how crucial Mechner’s martial arts sensation was to the industry. Documents and demos were extracted from an ancient artefact, the floppy disc, to give a no-stone-unturned recount of the development process. As a budding game dev myself, I found oodles of value in learning how Mechner’s humble beginnings led to brilliance for both himself and gaming.

Karateka is a tale as old as time, and one that we as gamers are very familiar with, a hero, in this case a martial artist, breaching a fortress to rescue a princess from an evil warlord. Very straightforward concept, but seeing all the thought that went into it before I played the final version really showed the absolute power this game had. It was praised for cinematic storytelling in the decade that spawned masterpieces like Indiana Jones and The Karate Kid, and that was no easy feat.

With a good dosage of whacks and thwaks alongside the music of Francis Mechner, Jordan Mechner’s father, Karateka’s audio was incredibly expressive for the time. There’s plenty of commentary explaining how the story, music, and gameplay created a winning combo.

The highlight for me was a demonstration of rotoscoping, the early solution to animation mo-cap that would go on to be a staple of early fighting games, most notably, Mortal Kombat (1992). Look where games like this are at now with mo-cap and it’s easy to see how far we’ve come from humble beginnings thanks to projects like Karateka.

The game demos are playable prototypes of Mechner’s earlier projects and a few versions of Karateka throughout its life. The original versions may prove nostalgic if it was part of your childhood, but for the sheer age of the game, it’s clunky and tough to play.

The actual game began for me with Karateka Remastered, a revamped version of the original with pixellated but more defined graphics, updated reprisals of the original music, and reworked sound effects, but it remained a great tribute that didn’t stray too far from the original. This was the best way to experience Karateka, modernised, albeit still fairly clunky. Playing games through retro-coloured glasses tends to lead to disappointment, so imagine my relief they considered an updated demo.

Karateka is loyal to its martial arts inspiration. It’s not a good old button-mash enemies-to-death time, but a martial arts simulation that requires patience and discipline to survive. However, my patience quickly wore thin with the slow combat encounters and unresponsive PS5 controller inputs of each game. The actual Karateka game involves 3 stages taking about an hour to beat… a feat which is easier said than done, as beating it is strangely difficult for the weak-willed and impatient.

The Making of Karateka itself takes a few hours accounting for videos, media, reading, and gameplay. It didn’t feel like too little or too much content. Though with a text-heavy focus, it dragged where I would have liked to spend more time experiencing the interactive documentary as a game itself rather than what sometimes felt like a research project.

The Making of Karateka is not the conventional idea of a game, but more of a journey through the timeline from idea to completion. While the interactive documentary format is intriguing, I would have liked a bit more emphasis on the interactive component, more of a game within a game as my immersion slowly dwindled. Though The Making of Karateka may not be the ultimate gaming experience, it’s a great reminder of why games like Karateka hit so hard. Digital Eclipse is contributing to the preservation of gaming history with this first interactive documentary of their Gold Master series, and I for one love to see it.

Written by: Yasmin Noble