Karateka

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Karateka came out in 1984, written by Jordan Mechner while he was a student, and published by Brøderbund. It told its story like a film: titles, a prologue, scenes that cut between the hero and the villain, and fighters that moved as people do, at a time when the figures of games jumped from one pose to the next. Mechner went on to write Prince of Persia.

This page starts Karateka from its original disk, watches its titles and prologue, and plays the start of the game, up the cliff and through the first guard.

What you need

Karateka.woz, Karateka in the woz-a-day collection of the Internet Archive: download Karateka (woz-a-day collection).zip and take it out of it. It is the original disk, copy protection and all. ./fetch-disks.sh in this repository downloads it into disks/ and checks it.

Broderbund’s manual of Karateka is on the Internet Archive.

The machine

An Apple ][+ with one disk drive and a joystick:

• the 6502 processor at 1 MHz, 48 KB of memory, and Applesoft BASIC in its ROM;
• the keyboard of the ][+, which types only capitals;
• a joystick in its game port, which izapple2 makes of the mouse of your computer when no joystick is connected;
• a Disk II controller card in slot 6, with the Karateka disk in drive 1.

izapple2 -model none -board 2plus -cpu 6502 -screen color \
    -rom "<internal>/Apple2_Plus.rom" \
    -charrom "<internal>/Apple2rev7CharGen.rom" -forceCaps \
    -s6 diskii,disk1=disks/Karateka.woz

The model 2plus of izapple2 has this machine, with a Language Card and a Videx Videoterm 80 column card more:

izapple2 -model 2plus -screen color disks/Karateka.woz

The film

1. Start izapple2 with the command above. After the drive, the titles, one after the other.

   

2. Wait. The prologue rolls up the screen, in the letters of the game.

   

   High atop a craggy cliff, guarded by an army of fierce warriors, stands the fortress of the evil warlord Akuma. You are the karateka, to fight your way in and free the princess Mariko.

3. Wait. The first scene: Akuma in his fortress, and the princess Mariko, his captive. He sends her away, to a room of her own, where she faints.

   

   Then the game plays a part of itself, a demonstration, until a key is pressed.

The game

1. Press Space when the demonstration starts. The fortress, on its cliff against the moon.

   

2. Wait for the karateka to climb up, and then push the joystick up and to the right to run, and let go of it when a guard comes, which puts the karateka in the fighting stance.

   

   The arrows at the bottom are the strength of each, the karateka’s at the left, the guard’s at the right.

3. Fight: press button 0 to kick. The joystick up or down makes the kick high or low, and button 1 punches. Each blow that lands takes an arrow away; the guard is down when he has none left. The recording, at the speed of the machine, kicks every 0.6 seconds with the joystick in the middle, and wins in about a minute.

   

   

   The manual gives keys for all of it as well, Q, A and Z to punch high, middle and low and W, S and X to kick, but in izapple2 they did not make the karateka fight; the joystick does.

What next

Lode Runner is the other game of Brøderbund on these pages, from the year before.