You can watch it here. Includes short documentaries about her from 1974 and 1999. (Last screenshot is of a video montage from her 1993 Chelsea Hotel documentary.)
When the Digital Eclipse team told me they wanted to give my early game Karateka "the Criterion treatment" and re-release it in a deluxe remastered edition, I couldn’t quite picture exactly what they had in mind. Their enthusiasm and evident passion for video game history inspired confidence, so I said yes. I never in my wildest dreams imagined how far they’d take it.
The photo above captures my dad’s reaction as (age 92) he watches himself climbing up onto the hood of our family car forty years earlier. He’s wearing a karate gi at my request, in a Super 8 film I shot at age 18 to create rotoscoped animation for Karateka. (This was three years before I pressed my 15-year-old brother into service as the model for my next game, Prince of Persia.)
Digital Eclipse has reconstructed my Super 8 rotoscoping process — from film to pencil tracings to pixelated game character — in their interactive, hands-on “Rotoscope Theater.” And that’s just one element of “The Making of Karateka.” It’s packed with audio and video interviews with me, my dad, and game-industry luminaries; a podcast about Karateka’s music (which my dad composed); rare original design documents; excerpts from my journals; and 14 playable games — including not only the final Apple II, Commodore, and Atari versions of Karateka, but also work-in-progress builds I submitted to Broderbund along the way, tracking its development from prototype to gold master. All the games are playable on a choose-your-own nostalgic menu of period monitors and TVs, with optional audio commentary and a “watch/play” mode that the Dagger of Time would envy.
As a bonus, they’ve salvaged and resurrected my never-before-published arcade shoot-em-up Deathbounce (the game I made before Karateka, which teenage me hoped would be my ticket to software success in 1982)… and the one I did before that, an unauthorized Apple II clone of the arcade hit Asteroids. Incredibly, they’ve not only remastered Karateka, but also remade Deathbounce, using today’s technology to reimagine my 1982 prototype as a jazzy twin-stick shooter. All these are included and playable in “The Making of Karateka.”
If “The Making of Karateka” were an interactive exhibition in the Strong Museum of Play (from whose collection many of the archival materials came), it would require several rooms and a full afternoon to explore. Now, you can download, play and discover it at your leisure, on your favorite platform. Details and links are on the Karateka page on my website.
With this release, Digital Eclipse has set a new bar for game-development history preservation. I’m touched and honored that they chose Karateka as the first title in their planned Gold Master series. I can’t wait to see what comes next.
