Digital Eclipse’s Making of Karateka is a fantastic interactive documentary giving a Criterion Collection quality exploration of a game as well as preserving it to allow people to play it. The collection focuses on Jordan Mechner’s early years in game dev up until the release of Karateka and its ports. The collection is structured in chapters chronologically with each chapter being comprised of timelines that showcase a smorgasbord of information dealing with Mechner’s early works and Karateka. This information includes content such as concept art, magazine articles, interactive viewers that allow you to see how the animation process of Karateka was designed, and present day interviews with people like Mechner, some of the old Broderbund crew who worked on Karateka, and game devs inspired by the game such as Tom Hall and John Tobias. The way this all is structured is really engaging. The interviews dealing with Mechner’s early years are especially charming as he and his dad reminisce how the whole family inspired and worked to help Jordan make Karateka like how his dad dressed up in a karate gi and essentially did the motion capture for the Karateka MC and how he composed the whole soundtrack. Making of Karateka also does a splendid job preserving not only Karateka and two of its most popular ports, but it also has playable prototype builds. It also has previously unreleased games Mechner made before Karateka complete with earlier design builds as well, one of them being Death Bounce, an Asteroids inspired space shooter. There’s just so much clear love and care put in this collection’s creation and it’s truly splendid to see, especially because video game history and preservation isn’t considered as a serious undertaking compared to older artistic mediums such as literature and film. Video games, being the youngest of the mediums, was born in the age of mass corporatization where being a product that sells is considered to be far more important than being of piece of artistic media that should be celebrated. Films managed to emerge right before rampant commercialization happened so they were still able to be considered art that needed to be preserved, but games haven’t been as lucky and tend to just be considered expendable products, especially by major publishers. It’s just so heartening that it exists. I do have one problem when it comes to this whole package though, I think Karateka is just a straight up bad game.

Karateka may have been a technical marvel at the time, as the documentary materials extensively shows, but it has completely aged like milk and is just not a good game to actually play anymore, especially in the present when a vast plethora of games have surpassed it in all regards. It’s slow, clunky, and repetitive, combat is just mainly spamming kick and moving and back forth, the hitbox on the eagle is an absolute pain in the ass, and running is super awkward and can lead to enemies’ one-shotting you if you don’t get into combat stance fast enough. There’s no lives or continues so you just gotta slog through all those boring fights and unskippable cutscenes all over again. I’m admittedly not a big fan of 80’s games, but I can pick up games like Super Mario Bros., Tetris, or Galaga and have fun with them and respect their quality, plus they’re still quite accessible. Karateka is just miserable, to the point I’m surprised people even liked it at the time. Like it’s kinda sad to me the most fun I had with Jordan Mechner’s older games in this collection was his blatant ripoff of Asteroids he made in high school. Similar to my thoughts on Night Dive’s remaster of Rise of the Triad this year, I feel Digital Eclipse gave a gold star treatment polishing to a turd, an influential one, but a turd nonetheless. Digital Eclipse also did their own remasters of Karateka and Death Bounce, they’re more playable but they still don’t really salvage the games at all to me. The Karateka remaster does add the option of giving yourselves extra lives and it does play a little better but it adds the leopard that got the cut from the original game and that section is just awful. The Death Bounce remaster is okay, though I feel the Rover is just kind of bullshit, though arcade space shooters ain’t really my forte.

Overall Making of Karateka is a wonderful documentary and preservation package for a game that has unfortunately not stood the test of time at all. Regardless if you have any interest in video game history I whole-heartedly recommend it. Definitely looking forward to Digital Eclipse possibly making this an entire series and cover games that were influential and actually good, like Doom or Monkey Island. Man, I want a Doom one so bad…