The Making of Karateka

Not as interesting to me personally as Digital Eclipse's later work with Tetris, but it's still easy to see why this codified their modern Digital Museum project format. Karateka is also in its own right pretty interesting for a game I'd never heard of before the documentary game hit. It's really fascinating to see Karateka take some extremely early baby steps into the world of narrative and cinematic framing in video games at a time when the sheer limitations of the hardware available made such things extremely difficult to even approximate. The Karateka Remastered production is also really cool, strikes a strong balance between honoring the original rotoscoping and minimalist framing and adding in just enough quality of life performance improvements and visual flourishes to better convey the original vision. 4/5 stars

Digital Eclipse strikes us with 'The Making of Karateka,' a first in their lineup of "Gold Master" series in which they present a documentary presented with some historical pieces that also gives you a game collection with it and Karateka's is a mostly fantastic package to go through. Compared to 'Tetris Forever' (as of this review the only 2 I've tried in the series) the pacing and documental telling of how Karateka was made is way more consistent to follow, it rarely broke up the video sections abruptly and actually let people talk. It's a really good watch especially when you see Jordan Mechner doing things like rotoscoping the animations frame by frame or even how his father Francis Mechner inspired a lot of the choices in the game including the rotoscoping and heck he even composed the soundtrack of Karateka on multiple platforms as well, just a fun watch when looking at everything from how Karateka set a standard to how handmade everything truly was with it, just really good. The game collection here is pretty good even if I did want to see a couple more versions of Karateka here, but this could've been done to licensing issues considering a good portion of ports weren't done by Brøderbund. You'll get 14 different games all together which is also including the prototypes. I won't talk about every single title, but I will give my thoughts on a bit of them below if interested. The original trio of Karateka from the Apple II, Commodore 64, and lastly the Atari 8 bit, while the Apple II version is the original and did a lot of creative things for said platform I think the Atari 8 bit version is the best as it just simply felt better to play, but the C64 itself has the best soundtrack. 'Karateka Remastered' however is simply the best version of the game here as it simply controls better with higher framerate, looks way better, and does sound pretty good, but the goals here especially since they don't save are an absolute pain in the @$$. 'Deathbounce' was a cool idea that never got released until now, this was spun off from an 'Asteroids' clone Jordan had made, at first being bouncy balls getting changed into birds and birds that laid eggs that are reminiscent of the bouncy balls, etc, it's got a lot going on in the character department, but is fun if you like 'Asteroids.' 'Deathbounce Remastered' is probably the best version here, while the other builds are mostly cool they are also prototypes and incomplete while this is fully complete, a pretty fun twin stick shooter going from room to room on these trains trying to get to the last room to destroy and orb. Pretty fun. Overall yes I do recommend 'The Making of Karateka,' if you like the aspect of a game collection with a documentary being attached then it's absolutely great, also from the stance of game preservation. I think $20 is more than fair for what's being asked, but at $7 on sale right of writing this up, it's an easy snag that you won't regret.