A look at Digital Eclipse's brilliant Making of Karateka.
I have caught glimpses of this book-non-book over the years. Maddening glimpses. There's something of it in The Spy's Guidebook, which is an overview of codes and kids' espionage stuff and also, in a way, the design document for a million summer holidays.
Maybe you understand this desire, poorly articulated, for a book that resists the confines of its own covers, that seems eager to shrug off various forms at will and blend readability and writeability . If so, I reckon you will love The Making of Karateka, which has just come out. I should add: there are plenty of other reasons to love this brilliant piece of software, but the book-non-book was my way in, and I reckon there are worse ways to get started here.
In essence, this really is the making of Karateka, a vividly cinematic karate game that came out in the early 1980s and serves as an intriguing ancestor to everything from Uncharted to 50 Flights of Loving. It was made by Jordan Mechner, and it used the rotoscoped animation that I more immediately associate with his follow-up game, Prince of Persia.
Cor, you get to the bottom of it here. You learn about what Mechner was like as a kid, his love of movies, his experience at Yale and his rocketing path to success. But you aren't just told it, in text and lovely, sweet-natured video clips. You get to read diary entries and design documents, you get to play prototypes of early games. You might get a breakdown of the music or pages from an autobiographical graphic novel.
At first I was eager to play the several different versions of Karateka itself included in the package, but over time I found myself drawn to other elements. Karateka is a funny beast. It's cinematic but it actually has the starkness of theatre. Except, unlike theatre, it uses cross-cuts to create tension.
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