The Making Of: Karateka
Few calling cards were as impressive as Jordan Mechner’s first videogame. Here, the acclaimed developer reveals how a love of animation and the Apple II led him to a lifelong career
Jordan Mechner reveals the origins of his 8-bit game that would inspire Prince Of Persia
"Dear Mr Mechner,” began the typed letter with the heading ‘Greetings Earthling’ in a futuristic font. It was addressed to one Jordan Mechner in California, care of Brøderbund Software. “I am writing because I have played your game Karateka,” it stated. “I am writing because you need to be congratulated on this game.”
Gushing about the graphics, the shadows
“and all”, the writer enthused about the “tremendous job”, which he believed “defined the state of the art for future Apple games”. The writer, John Romero, was so taken by the game and its stunning visual effects that he tried to guess the techniques Jordan used.
John was in awe of Jordan, and he admitted he drew great inspiration from Karateka. Two years later, aged 19, he started work at Origin Systems and two years after that he was having a major hand in producing games such as Doom and Quake. But we refer to that letter of 1985 for a reason: Karateka was a landmark game, and a title that was so innovative that developers in their formative years wanted to learn from it. “Disciple of the Great Jordan and worshipper of the Magnificent Mechner,” John Romero signed off. He would not have been the only one to be so inspired.
Jordan grew up with a love of animation. As a child, he would write stories, draw them and bring them to life on Super 8 film. He would have continued to do just that had he not become involved with an initiative run by
IBM called Explorers, in which the computing giant would invite children to use its computer terminals after school. It was on these machines that he began to program in BASIC and APL.
By the time he was 14, his fascination had turned to obsession. His head was turned following weeks and months of playing on his friend’s Apple II, realising he could make games that were similar to animated movies, helped along by the graphical prowess of the machine. He saved up and bought his own.
“I loved the Apple II,” he enthuses. “I really enjoyed programming on it. I took it to college with me and I spent most of my freshman year programming a game called Deathbounce.
It was a shoot‑’em‑up, which I tried to get Brøderbund interested in taking on because I loved that publisher so much. They didn’t want it, and I was crushed.”
But far from becoming disillusioned and giving up, he was rather taken by a new Brøderbund game called Choplifter, which he says blew him away. “It had the smoothest, most sophisticated animation I’d ever seen on an Apple II,” he says. And he vowed at that point to make a cinematic game. The seeds of Karateka – the name of which means a practitioner of karate – were sown.
From an early stage, Jordan wanted the new game to draw on the silent film techniques that he had learned about in his history of cinema classes. The visuals of the game were important to him and he wanted people to stop in their tracks and be amazed by the graphics and the animation. He drew on aspects of his life that interested him at the time.
“I took a lot of inspiration from sources other than games,” he says. “My favourite Kurosawa film, Seven Samurai, was one, and I also liked the artist Hokusai and his Japanese woodblock prints. I was intrigued by the American film director DW Griffith, and early silent movies. I liked
how they used cross‑cutting to create suspense. I was also very much into Bruce Lee movies, Disney animation and the karate classes I was taking over the summer. All of that got thrown into the mix.”
Jordan set his game in feudal Japan and the plot was simple and, with hindsight, rather typical and cliched – telling of an evil warlord called Akuma kidnapping your girlfriend, Mariko, prompting you to fight his minions to rescue her from his fortress. Indeed, it was a story that would be familiar to those who played Jordan’s next game, Prince Of Persia.
And yet, in this instance, the plot was secondary to the animation, although Jordan wanted his game to have a sense of purpose, with the karate gameplay moving the story along. “The idea is that you are fighting to rescue the woman you love from a kidnapper. It’s not continued fighting for the sake of
it,” he says. It was Jordan’s aim to produce lifelike characters in a fighting game that was more cinematic than any that had gone before it that caught most attention, however. He aimed to introduce tracking shots and cross‑cutting, as well as a method of animation that had not been tried in gaming before called rotoscoping, in which filmed footage is traced over frame by frame and turned into realistic animation.
Whereas the original idea had been to draw the frames by hand, Jordan decided it looked too much like ‘programmer animation’. “It was not nearly good enough for what I was dreaming of,” he admits. “A huge leap forward came when I decided to try rotoscoping, and the game was starting to evolve quite a lot from its original conception.”
The player had to control their own martial arts in a battle against the enemy. Kicking and punching through the fodder, it was possible to determine the height of the blows. Jordan wanted characters to look as if they were real, with every punch and kick played out as it would in his classes. This, he believed, would capture his love of animation.
“I had a great book by two early Disney animators and I knew they’d used rotoscoping as an animation aid,” he says. “I used Super 8 film to shoot my mom’s karate teacher doing punches and kicks, then traced the outlines into the computer. Despite the primitive technology, it worked well. Later, I used a more refined version in Prince Of Persia, and then again in The Last Express.”
As well as the rotoscoping, he was keen to infuse Karateka with as much Japanese influence as possible. ‘Akuma’ means ‘devil’, and the Akuma Castle is inspired by the Himeji Castle near Kyoto, Japan. This was one of the very first martial arts games – coming three years before Street Fighter and beating Kung Fu Master and Karate Champ by a few months – and Jordan was ensuring it was nothing if not faithful.
Since the joysticks of the time had few buttons, the moves of Karateka were not complex in the slightest, but it fitted his desire of being a pick‑up‑and‑play kind of game. But despite trying to keep things relatively simple, it was still a major challenge for Jordan. He had to produce everything from scratch on his Apple II, programming in machine code. Drawing items on‑screen was initially a laborious process in which he had to code the tools to allow him to create freely, and it took him many months.
Jordan’s main difficulty was keeping his motivation high. He was 18, at college, and he had to balance work with play as well as the game. “It was the biggest project of any kind I’d taken on in my whole life,” he says. “It kept on
growing as I added new ideas and made it more ambitious. The challenge was to keep coming back to it. To not stop. But I was in college so obviously there were interruptions.”
The difficult part was that he produced the game largely on his own, with friends Gene Portwood and Lauren Elliot helping with additional graphics and animation. His father, who became an accomplished classical concert pianist by the age of 19 and worked as a research psychologist, composed the music, and Jordan spent ages working out how to take that score and translate it from reams of handwritten sheet music into assembly machine code.
But, after two‑and‑a‑half years, it was ready. Six months earlier, he had sent it on a 5.25‑inch floppy disk to Brøderbund and EA. He was determined the game would not fail as his previous one had, so he ensured they only saw it when it was pretty much done.
“Brøderbund called back and said they wanted to publish it,” he recalls. “They flew me out to California for the summer to make changes, which was primarily expanding the game. That summer was my introduction to working at a professional game studio. It was a huge thrill, meeting my heroes – people like Dan Gorlin, who’d made Choplifter – and being accepted as a colleague, not just a kid who’d been fiddling with a computer. It was what I’d been dreaming of since age 14.”
Jordan’s dream became a reality and Karateka was released in 1984, with a NES port coming in the same year. It was later ported to a host of other systems, from the Amstrad CPC and Atari 800 to the Commodore 64 and DOS PCS two years later, “The PC version seemed okay, except for overall sluggishness, frequent disk accesses, and a few minor graphics glitches.
Then I booted up the Apple version to compare and it was so smooth it made me want to cry,” Jordan recalls. Interestingly, in an ‘Ask Me Anything’ session on Reddit in 2013, Jordan revealed that he felt Robert Cook’s conversions for the C64 and Atari 400/800 were the best ports, revealing they “actually improved on the Apple II in certain ways, especially sound and music. My dad reorchestrated the entire score to take advantage of the better sound, and
Robert tore his hair out trying to get it all to play correctly”. The success of Karateka was such that in April 1985, it was ranked as the bestselling game in America by Billboard magazine, a tremendous achievement for such a young programmer. In 1988, an Atari ST version was released, while the Game Boy received a rather disappointing version called Master Karateka in December 1989. Thankfully, that particular version never made it west. Amazingly, Karateka was even released in 1990 for the humble ZX Spectrum in Spain. More than 500,000 units of Karateka were sold, including 250,000 units in its first month of release in Japan. Jordan left Yale with a BA in psychology and decided to pursue programming. “It was a miracle I ever graduated,” he concludes. But with Prince Of Persia and The Last Express still to come, the gaming world was glad he stuck with it.
“IT THE WAS BIGGEST PORFOJAENCYT TAKEN KIND I’D ON IN WHOLE MY LIFE” JORDAN MECHNER