Even leading up to its release, I wasn’t sure what exactly The Making of Karateka would turn out to be. A collection of games? A documentary with interviews? Some remasters or reinterpretations of the original titles? All of it, turns out. And it’s a fascinating compilation that, in a way, was possible due to how impactful and important Karateka was and because Jordan Mechner, its creator, detailed his experiences in a diary that was published as a book years ago.
While I can’t say that Karateka had a huge impact on me directly, after all it was released before I was born, I still vividly remember encountering it in my childhood and being fascinated by it. I’m not sure if I had already experienced Prince of Persia by that point or not, a game that had a far greater influence on how I saw games, I still liked elegant simplicity of its design in both gameplay and storytelling. I also remembered how incredibly rude several traps and enemies were, which was unfortunately reflective of the game design school of the time. Though, I’ll still give Karateka that it, at least, had not too many cheap ways of killing you that you could not predict. Those that were there were very cruel, however.
So it was very curious to see how exactly this game came to be and the experience of doing it through The Making of Karateka felt very novel. You get your interviews and videos, as one would expect from a documentary, and those are full of interesting facts and details. But also you get scans of documents, photographs and physical objects that you can rotate and read. And on top of that, and most interestingly, you get faithful recreations of different versions of two games. An unreleased title Deathbounce, that was developed right before switching to Karateka, and the main game itself. And by different versions I mean several prototype versions and games that were never released before, the retail versions of Karateka on Apple II, Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bit and new remastered versions created specifically for this collections. You can just play the games from the game library, but the intended experience is going through the timeline of events that mix all of these mediums together into one coherent journey.
Of course, the question is – how fun is it to play Karateka today in any of the available versions? Well… That’s a bit of a tough one. I would say – yes. Even if only for historic value. While the game might feel slow and even sluggish, even in the Remastered version, and some occasional traps are genuinely unfun, there’s still a lot of wonderful craft behind the title. And some of the ideas feel ingenious. The two stances, that would become even more important in Prince of Persia, have since defined entire genres, where you have different sets of controls depending on you’re attacking or exploring. The way your and enemy health regenerates during battle and between battles strikes a really curious balance between being patient but also being aggressive. Some of the cinematic techniques and general framing of the shots in the game still look fantastic. And while I question the desire to keep some of the jank of the original games and even add new one by restoring originally not implemented ideas, I also appreciate how original versions of the game allow some quality of life features and a rewind feature while the Remastered version allows you to have more than one life.
It looks like Digital Eclipse is marketing this as a start of a collection of interactive documentaries and I can’t wait to see what other games will get a similar treatment. But starting with Karateka seemed like a very smart choice and I recommend checking The Making of Karateka to people who grew up playing this game at some point in their life and those, who love videogames but have never heard about this classic gem before.