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.
Game history and preservation is such an overwhelming concept. Some things are easy, like a game that lives inside a cartridge. That is a definitive version of the thing. But some games were online-only, or on services that no longer exist, and even then continually updated and changed over time. They’re houses built on sand, enjoyed in the moment but not meant to last.
How does one tell the story of a game when the game is no longer the game one remembers? Impressions of the time? Perfect recreations? And beyond the thing itself is the feelings of it, the memories of having played that thing at that time in that place, and how it has informed what you do.
The stories from people who worked on them, and played them, and cared about those games in ways others cannot understand, it’s that stuff that worries me, because I want us to have it all. I want it all to be with us, regardless of any degree of importance placed upon those stories by an industry and culture that tells us to move forward, there are new games, please just buy and play our new games so that we may continue to exist and profit from this work.
Maybe rote data is the most we can hope for. This happened on this date, in these places. You may find it, and experience it for yourself, if enough people cared enough to preserve it for you. You may make an obsession of it and become the one who preserved it.
This is the most important thing in the world, and it doesn’t matter at all. What makes it into the canon is as meaningless as putting a flag in the ground and saying this dirt is mine.
This passage from Pure Invention by Matt Alt will now be seared into my brain forever.
We don’t deserve Kelsey Lewin. She’s so dedicated to preserving video game history and it was great to see her become co-director of the Video Game History Foundation.
When does one transition from “retro game enthusiast” to “history enthusiast.”
I think my happy place is museum exhibits about video games, but like an actual museum where it’s not people talking and noise like every convention. Just a quiet, chill space with nicely curated exhibits about video games and artifacts and placards that include interesting information and maybe a bench or two to sit among it all for a bit.
So I live in silicon valley and it’s sort of like living wedged in between various kingdoms, what with Google and Facebook to the north-west and Apple to the south and various other big companies with huge sprawling campuses all around here. Knowing those places shuffle around billions of dollars is kind of nuts (especially in relation to the poverty all around them).
But I’m also aware that I live in the city where Atari got started. I’m not a big Atari person but I know the history and prominence of that company, and since moving to Sunnyvale (just one letter shy of the hell mouth) I’ve kind of poked around to see what vestiges remain of those game companies from the pre-00s. You can look up addresses of the old HQs and warehouses but much of the time you’ll just find some condos and apartment buildings.
But today, prompted by that recent visit to the Computer History Museum, I decided to look up Andy Capp’s tavern, the spot where the first Pong prototype was installed and Atari realized they had a hit. Turns out the tavern is long closed, of course, but the building still stands as a comedy club. I went there once many years ago, before I knew what used to be there and it was literally right up the street from my house.
