The Making of Karateka Review

22.09.2023 - 23:13 / ign.com

We live in a time of exceptional video game quality and abundance: There’s always too much to play (especially as I type this in September of 2023). So it’s all the more surprising that The Making of Karateka, which focuses on a game from nearly 40 years ago, totally captivated me. Part classic game collection and part documentary, wrapped in an interactive historical experience, The Making of Karateka follows the true story of a teenager’s path to publishing a hit video game in 1985. And the story is a good one. While Karateka is not a particularly fun 2D-fighting game to play, exploring its story in this weird and wonderful package is very much so.

What makes this story extra special is twofold: First, the surviving documentation of college student Jordan Mechner (who went on to make the original Prince of Persia) creating a video game for the Apple II, Commodore 64, and other early PCs with the help of his immediate family, especially his father, is extensive and exquisitely preserved here. Jordan’s personal journals and goofy development sketches, playable code of multiple game iterations, typewritten paper correspondence between him and his publisher, and even 3D scans of 5.25-inch floppy discs with their original Sharpie-on-sticker labels – the amount of detail gets even more exacting from there.

Second, Digital Eclipse’s interactive timeline presentation of these documents, video segments, and of course, the games themselves, are irresistible to explore. (This playable history platform debuted in Atari 50 last year, which scored a 9 on IGN.) The experience is not passive, like a film documentary: There are little tools to compare audio and visual tweaks between versions, a timeline to check off your progress, and an entire, playable version of Karateka with developer commentary built right in. The commentary, by Digital Eclipse developer Mike Mika, is a documentary unto itself. Seemingly Karateka’s biggest fan, Mika’s explanation of why he loves this game goes well beyond the screen and deep into the fragile balance of programming tricks that made smooth animation possible on a computer better equipped for primitive arcade ports. (One of these ports, an Asteroids knockoff, was in fact created by a teenage Jordan Mechner.)

This remake is actually a much more fun version of Karateka, which still feels clunky and inaccessible in its original forms (of which there are five included in this collection, including ports and demos). Digital Eclipse’s Karateka is definitely worth playing through – but only after watching the documentary (and giving yourself some extra lives) for some very important context. Without spoiling anything, the ending “twist” is both funny and shocking.

Atari 50: The Anniversary