International Karate

Credits: Developed by Andromeda Software for System 3; programmed by István Cseri; graphics by Zoltán Tóth (“Sultan”); game design by Mark Cale; Atari ST release 1986.

You hear the words "International Karate" or "IK+", and you instantly think of Archer MacLean... but it seems he didn't touch the ST port of his famous game (although he did later develop IK+ himself for the ST).

The chiptune is nice enough although does get monotonous fairly quickly, and the game features digitised sound effects at 3.8 kHz.  Why 3.8kHz and not 4, or even 8? Who knows... I guess it's probably due to disk space. The game came on two disks - single-sided, I think - even though the STFM could use double-sided disks. Again, there must have been a reason for that... but I don't know what it was.

Chill out in the opera house after you win. Or, after you lose.

Anyway, back to the game. I suppose the thing that stands out most is the big, well-animated sprites - since, as mentioned previously, the ST was pretty notorious for not handling big sprites very well. It helps that there is no scrolling and only two characters moving, but still, the characters and their animations look really good. The game is truly "international" in that every round is held in a different country, with nicely drawn backgrounds and some neat little animations.

Hawaiian  beaches aren't great places for karate competitions, are they? Wouldn't the sand get everywhere?!

The game itself plays well and is fairly fluid, the controls are varied enough to allow for different strategies, and the AI opponent is a decent challenge - you can usually win as long as you pay attention and your timing is on point. 2-player is more fun of course, as is always the case! Some moves - flying kick, roundhouse kick - are immensely satisfying when you manage to pull them off perfectly, but there are some less impressive though very effective moves you'll probably tend to fall back to a lot of the time.

Fantastic use of colour in this scene.

There are mini-games between some stages - avoiding weapons that someone is kindly hurling at you or breaking boards with your head (which you can see me fail at in the gameplay video, because when I reached that part, I completely forgot what I was supposed to do!). Perhaps not quite as memorable as the mini-games in IK+, but they do helps add variety to what is otherwise a repetitive (but still fun) gameplay loop.

I wouldn't necessarily call it a classic, but International Karate is a memorable game in its own right and holds up surprisingly well today.

As you can see, I have perfectly mis-timed my flying kick here.

An interesting little snippet from my research for this post:

International Karate was a huge success beyond Europe; in the US it was published by Epyx as World Karate Championship, became the first European-developed game to top the Billboard software charts, and reportedly sold over 1.5 million copies there. This also created a legal battle between Epyx and Data East over similarities to Karate Champ. The lower court initially ruled against Epyx, but that decision was later reversed on appeal in 1988.

I lost... but the Beefeater guards remain unmoved.

Here's a quick gameplay video - look, it's been a long time, okay? Also I reached a mini-game and completely forgot what I was supposed to do for it. The joy of revisiting old games!! 🤣🤣