Karateka returns

I recently asked why Jordan Mechner’s Prince of Persia has enjoyed more diverse success and adaptation than other Apple II originals. That’s now proven to be a prescient musing, as yesterday Mechner announced on his blog that his debut title, Karateka, will be re-imagined as a new game for Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network later in 2012.

Like PoP, the original Karateka for the Apple II employed rotoscoping to create fluid graphics and animations. Its one-on-one martial arts bouts could be seen as a precursor to games such as Karate Champ and even Street Fighter. Yet despite being such an archetype, the game is being approached for a remake with a very different lineage than the many PoP sequels have been. As Mechner told Gamasutra:

In the 27 years since its release, it’s never had a sequel or an adaptation. And yet it’s stayed in people’s minds all this time. It seems to hold a special place in many gamers’ hearts, as it does in mine. It’s the game that started my career — you can’t get more indie than the Apple II — and its compact design, simple story and pick-up-and-play philosophy made it perfect for a downloadable game.

The new Karateka will not be a sequel but a fuller realization of Mechner’s original characters and plot using modern technology:

The Apple II was a bit limited, in that a game could be acclaimed as a cinematic masterpiece of fluid animation while actually it was struggling to eke out eight frames per second — or even less, if the palace gate happened to be on screen at the same time. The music could only play one note at a time, no chords, and I couldn’t animate the characters and play a note at the same time — given the 1KHz [sic] microprocessor it was one or the other.

So I’m especially excited about what we can do with the graphics and animation and sound in the new Karateka, given the power of today’s consoles … I wanted to take advantage of XBLA and PSN technology to push this game to its production limits, and use graphics, sound and music to really put players into the world of feudal Japan in a way we couldn’t on the Apple II … I’ve tried to make Karateka the way I would have made it in 1984 had the technology been available, and had the Apple II been able to display more than 280×192 pixels and four colors.

But the remake won’t outperform the original in all ways. As Mechner told GameTrailers.com:

“If you turn both the video game console and your large flat-screen TV upside down, the entire game will play upside down,” Mechner joked. “We would have liked to make it do that if you just insert the disk upside down, like the original, but with a downloadable game unfortunately that wasn’t possible. See, 1980s technology was actually superior in some ways.”

The past three years have provided Apple II users with a bounty of opportunities to revisit their favorite classics as never before seen, with affordable downloads and remakes of games such as Choplifter, Lode Runner, and Prince of Persia. My own history with Mechner’s résumé includes more lends itself more to Karateka than PoP, and I’m eager to see how the creative force behind the original will remake such a relatively simple game as Karateka for modern platforms and audiences.