theres literally no wrong way to play singleplayer games btw. savescum, play on easy mode, mod, look up guides and walkthroughs, whatever the hell you want. always remember if it sucks hit da bricks
Dreading when everyone collectively decides that 3840 × 2160 is the new standard resolution and if you’re not working in that standard then you’re a lil baby.
Theater Camp dir. Molly Gordon & Nick Lieberman (2023)
I took a theater class one semester of high school, along with a final play at the end, and that is an intense type of person to hang around with. But I liked that there’s a subset of member who just does, like, building sets and stuff, because it me.
Okay, alright, things are starting to sag a bit after the peak of seasons 3 and 4. Not a show to binge watch. But I still want a super cut of Cryptkeeper intros and outros.
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.
Looking at my favorite recent games… I might have a type.
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.
