The game in which I frequently met my bloody end at an obstruction that was far more frightening than any enemy.
I had a simple method for discovering Commodore 64 games: I'd flip through the disks in my brother's disk case and load up the first one whose label bore an interesting-sounding title. That was it. That was my entire sampling process--the one in which I'd engage on a weekly basis.
Whenever I'd load up a new Commodore 64 game, I'd never know what to expect. Even when I was able to clearly make out its title and correctly pronounce the words that formed it, I wouldn't be able to develop a clear mental image of what it was about. All I could do was imagine several possibilities and hope that one of them was a match for the game's actual subject-matter.
And, well, I was rarely close. The majority of the time, reality would crush my expectations, and I'd find myself in a strangely unfamiliar space.
It was always like that with newly discovered Commodore 64 games. They were never what I expected them to be. And after a while, I started to think that this was by design--that Commodore 64 games existed for the sole purpose of rejecting my soundly formed mental constructions and audaciously sending me to the most unconventionally bizarre, most unfathomable places.
That was certainly the case when I discovered Karateka.
That's to say that I couldn't have guessed that, instead, something so contrarily unorthodox and worldview-challenging was waiting for me beyond its loading screen.
Mainly, Karateka was my introduction to "cinematic" games at a time long before I was able to comprehend such a concept. It was different from other action games, I recognized, but I couldn't explain how. I couldn't categorize it. All I could do, rather, was observe its curiously unique presentational events and try to gain an adequate understanding of what I was seeing.
The first curious event occurred during the intro's run-up. I watched on as the title screen's text scroll and the game's main theme began working together in an interesting way. They were harmonizing. The sudden appearances of primary textual information and important storyline bits were syncing perfectly with the main theme's most dramatic notes and most striking tonal shifts. I'd seen this type of harmonization in movies and TV shows' opening credits, yeah, but never in a video game's. I was shocked that you could even do something like this in a game!
This uniquely styled, alluringly novel intro told me that Karateka was going to be very different from other karate-based action games. It was going to defy convention. It was going to transcend boundaries and take me somewhere I'd never been before.
In truth, I didn't (and never did) watch the entire intro because its text scrolled at an incredibly slow speed and I didn't have the patience to spend several minutes intently staring at a computer screen. Though, still, I fully understood its message. I knew, from gauging its style of presentation, that its purpose was to inform me that Karateka was something out of the norm. And certainly its wonderfully distinctive spirit and energy resonated with me.
But consequently, I didn't know what the story was or if there was any depth to the characters. I didn't know who the hero and the villains were, where the game was taking place, or how high the stakes were. My guess was that Karateka's was a standard, simple tale of "heroic karate guy takes on an evil gang and attempts to rescue his kidnapped girlfriend."
"That's probably as deep as the game gets," I thought.
So basically I was being my typically oblivious self.
And then there was the game's opening scene, which made an unforgettable impact on me. Its breathtaking imagery instantly enchanted me and stirred my imagination in the most amazing way. Its every picturesque visual enraptured me and compelled me to intently and excitedly examine it. I was blown away by everything it was showing me.
In this scene, the unnamed hero climbed his way up a cliff and onto the base of the enemy's domain, which stood high above a vast ocean that stretched far into the distance and enveloped a large, strikingly rendered snow-covered mountain whose very presence provided the scene an awe-inspiring energy. And his arrival was accompanied by a sharp, heroic-sounding ditty that made the act feel incredibly dramatic.
I was captivated by this entire scene. I loved everything about it. And it became permanently ingrained in my memory. I never forgot it. The powerful mental images it inspired stayed with me, and to this day, they continue to represent some of my most beloved and cherished Commodore 64 memories.
Karateka's opening scene will always be iconic to me.
On the surface, Karateka looked a lot like Kung Fu Master, which I'd played many times in arcades, so I figured that I'd have no trouble understanding or getting into it. "This should be easy to play!" I thought.
And, well, it didn't work out that way. Instead there was only confusion and bewilderment.
To start, the hero didn't react to my inputs in the expected way. He wouldn't walk forward when I pressed right on the joystick, and he'd do random things when I hit the button (sometimes he'd enter into a fighting stance, and other times he'd attack). I didn't know what was going on. "Is my Atari 2600 controller broken?" I wondered. "Or is this a keyboard-only game?"
I feared that it was the latter and did so because I hated playing games with a keyboard. Playing games that had multiple inputs mapped to keys that were far apart from each other required a level of finger dexterity that I just didn't possess. I needed compactness and tactility. I needed to be holding a controller apparatus that contained tightly grouped buttons. And if a game didn't offer me a controller option, I'd be apt to avoid it.
"Or maybe this is one of those games that requires a combination of the two?" I theorized after discovering that one of the keyboard keys also made the hero enter into a fighting stance. "This isn't ideal," I thought, "but it would still be better than playing the game with just a keyboard!"
I tested my theory by hyperactively pressing every possible key while simultaneously fiddling with the controller. Though, I didn't get any conclusive results. All I found was that I could make the hero bow by using a certain combination of keyboard and controller inputs. That was it. There were no combinations that helped me to reliably execute attacks or advance forward.
But still, I was certain that my theory was correct--that Karateka was actually a controller-and-keyboard game. The only problem was that I had no idea how to make the controls function correctly. I couldn't find the inputs that would help me to finally maneuver away from the same cliff I'd been standing at since the start.
Almost every action game I'd played previously allowed me intuitively move left and right and execute attacks by inputting very simple commands, but suddenly here was Karateka defying the norm in an inexplicable way. It wasn't like other games, I was learning. It didn't care for simplicity, no. Rather, it demanded that I use multiple devices in conjunction and dexterously string together complicated directional and command inputs. It challenged me to create movement through rhythm.
This wasn't apparent to me at the start, so I just kinda stood there, at the cliff's base, and continuously alternated between entering into a fighting stance and pulling back and reentering a neutral position. Basically I spent an hour doing what amounted to the Hokey Pokey (you know--just to send the enemy a message that I was really serious about this whole "rescue operation" thing).
After I figured out that you couldn't trigger directional movement until you entered into a fighting stance, I began to inch my along and move toward the base's entry gate. Because I was able to do this with just the 2600 controller, I mistakenly came to think that my multi-device-control theory was incorrect and that I didn't actually need to use the keyboard. This would haunt me later on.
From then on, it was all a matter of making sense of the fighting commands.
What was most apparent to me was that Karateka had a completely foreign flair to it. Everything about its visuals, characters' movements, and general vibe said to me, "This game was probably made by people on the other side of the world--by people who had a deep understanding of Japanese culture and history" (had I paid closer attention to what was being displayed on the game's title screen, I'd have known that this wasn't the case).
At that point in my life, I associated "foreign" with "something strangely different," so I expected for Karateka's fighting system to have a number of curiously unique elements to it. And it did. That became clear to me when I encountered the game's first enemy, who didn't behave like the typical video-game grunt. To my surprise, he didn't angrily charge toward me and try to bump me off the screen the moment he appeared onscreen, no. Rather, he was of honorable character. He politely bowed to me before entering his fighting stance--an act that I considered to be a show of respect. I wanted to reciprocate and prove to him that I wasn't an impulsive idiot, but I couldn't because I wasn't sure how to execute the bowing move. And I worried that my failure to show respect would have serious repercussions later on; I feared that they'd resultantly become more angry and aggressive.
(I never was able to figure out how to bow to enemies, and I always felt bad about that. I felt as though my lack of reciprocity was serving to hurt the enemies' feelings! I wanted to say, "Sorry, guys, I just don't know how any of this works!" I hope they understood.)
The game's style of combat was like no other I'd ever experienced. It was tactical to the extreme, and the moment the engagement began, I got the sense that I was in way over my head. Combat required hefty amounts of calculation and patience, and the controls were complicated-feeling, and all I could think as I desperately tried to get a grasp on the fighting system was, "This game probably wasn't made for people like me."
"Whatever this style is," I thought to myself, "there's no way that I can come proficient at it."
So in lieu of learning the system and displaying actual skill, I decided to keep it simple and resign to abusing what appeared to be the most "effective" (read: "the most cheap and effortless") fighting maneuver: moving directly into my opponent's space and executing three low kicks in succession. All it required me to do was hold forward and mash the attack button. (I didn't want to try it with punches because the punch controls were mapped to the keyboard keys, which were out of my reach.)
This strategy helped me to take down the first gi-wearing karate guy (I always thought that he looked more like a doctor with his goofy nurse cap and protective face mask), who seemed apt to walk directly into my attacks. "So maybe I can do well in this game," I was inspired to think in that moment.
My victory was accentuated by short-but-inspiriting fanfare that did a great job of making me feel as though I'd pulled off an impressive feat. Though, honestly, I wasn't sure that my repeatedly-and-cheaply-kick-the-guy-in-the-knee strategy made me worthy of receiving such a reward.
If I took one lesson from this opening encounter, it was that moving in close and attacking preemptively was my best chance for success. I'd have to execute my moves quickly, though, since, I learned early on, any type of hesitancy would leave me open to a counterattack. Considering how quickly enemies' retaliatory combos drained my concerningly inadequate health meter, I couldn't afford to screw up and leave myself vulnerable--especially when I didn't have any backup strategy.
After I won the obvious warmup fight, I was able to pass through the "Japanese-looking entry gate" (the "torii gate," as it's actually called). My doing this triggered another cut-scene. In this one, the main villain, who I was convinced was a bell-bottomed robot with a hawk on his shoulder, commanded the next minion (the next available doctor on staff) to confront and challenge the hero. He did this by forcefully pointing at the room's left door. The pointing motion's swiftly executed animation was emphasized by a high-pitched, ominous-sounding G-sharp note that served as a powerful crescendo to the cut-scene's accompanying tune.
And the intensity with which the pointing motion and its accompanying note were delivered sent me a clear message: This main villain (who I was now calling "Robotron") wasn't messing around. He wanted the hero dead, and there were going to be serious consequences for any minion who failed to follow out his orders. When he spoke, people listened and obeyed--purely out of fear. He was authoritarian in a cold and frightening way.
This scene instantly became one of my favorites. I loved how it was crafted--how the synchronicity of the characters' actions and the music's notes told clear stories while still leaving a lot to the imagination. It was so strikingly unique. No other game had ever done anything like it.
The cut-scene was the setup for Karateka's next memorable cinematic showcase. In the following segment, the game built anticipation for my upcoming fight by doing something completely original: Its camera cut back and forth between between the hero and the minion as they determinedly ran toward each other!
Well, that's what the designers intended to happen. It was supposed to be that the brave hero and the motivated minion urgently, epically charged toward each other and continued doing so until they came face to face. But it didn't happen that way because I didn't know how to run. Instead I continued to inch my way along using my slow-and-cautious in-combat walk and advance at a glacial pace. And by doing this, I sucked all of the energy out of the intercut and thus contributed to the creation of the not-quite-as-riveting story of "inexplicably hesitant hero takes two baby steps at a time while determined minion charges toward him."
After a while, I started to realize that my failing to learn how to run was only serving to increase the game's difficulty. The slower you moved, I learned, the more enemies you had to fight. There wasn't a set amount of enemies in each area, no; they'd just keep coming until you reached the area's exit. But I just couldn't figure out how to do it! There were flashes of hope, sure, like when I'd get the hero to burst forward for two seconds at a time, but I could never evolve a burst into a sustained motion, nor could I consistently replicate the input that triggered the burst. Most of the time, I'd simply give up and just resignedly walk my way across the entire area.
Really, though, I was OK with advancing slowly. After all: Doing so gave me more time to test my theory that the karate doctors only had a limited number of funny-looking hats. "They'll run out of them eventually!" I figured.
Also, I didn't mind having to fight more enemies. My strategy of abusing cheap low-kick combos was working well for me, so I felt confident in my ability to take out a large succession of minions. I found it concerning that subsequent enemies' health meters were growing in size and beginning do dwarf mine, yeah, but I didn't worry too much because I'd developed some effective stalling tactics that allowed me to buy time and give my health meter time an opportunity to replenish itself. Usually these tactics would help me to make up the difference.
Karateka, like so many other Commodore 64 games, challenged my natural gaming instincts in an intimidating way, and for most of my childhood, it represented the unlearnable. "This isn't a type of game that I can ever fully grasp," I'd think to myself while playing it. "It's obviously made for 'advanced players,' and I'm just not ever going to be one of those."
Yet, still, I was never scared away by the game. I had big problems with its controls, yeah, but I was too captivated by every other part of it. I loved its visuals, its atmosphere, and its wonderfully unique cinematic elements too much to consider leaving it behind.
And though I wasn't any good at the game, I wanted to keep playing it and eventually beat it. So I decided that the best solution was to work around the controls and find a way to somehow will myself to the finish.
The best example was what I said earlier: Since learning how to run was out the question, I'd have to accept that inching my way forward and using cheap tactics to defeat a large number of minions was my only option. I'd have to reach the next the area, the base's interior, by making the best use of my small toolset.
The downside was that the process was draining and I'd usually start the next area in pretty bad shape. Engaging in this play-style was mentally taxing as well. "I don't know if I can keep this up for another 10 to 20 minutes," I'd think to myself while the next area loaded.
Though, I'd always look forward to seeing the new area's introductory cut-scene. In this one, the hero's captive girlfriend, as if sensing his arrival, lifted her head up and looked toward her prison's door with a hopeful gaze. Her head-lifting was accentuated by a beautifully sequenced, optimistic-sounding arpeggio that expressed, appropriately, that things were "looking up" for her.
It was an inspiring scene but only from an artistic perspective. In reality, it didn't make me feel any better about my chances of actually rescuing here.
The base's shadowy, darkly toned interior, with its coldly austere dojo-style appearance, had a more menacing feel to it. Its only comforting element was its succession of windows, which gave view to the skyline and the snow-covered mountain that had been occupying the background since the game's start. It was only a narrow view, yes, but still one that was greatly appreciated, since it helped to provide the area at least some sense of life.
Otherwise, the base interior's gameplay was mostly the same: you engaged one minion after another and did so until you reached the area's endpoint. The problem was the part that wasn't "mostly the same." There was something else in this place--something horribly nightmarish. It was one of the scariest things I'd ever encountered in a video game: a bird. Specifically, it was the gray hawk that had been perched on Robotron's shoulder the whole time. Now, suddenly, this winged beast had decided to leave its owner's side and attack me. And it was doing this at regular intervals; each time I'd score a victory, it would fly in and directly assault me.
The hawk's was never a surprise attack, no. The game would warn you of its appearance by playing the four-note ditty that was usually reserved for normal minions. But still the warning felt too last-second because the hawk was so damn fast! It needed to sound well before the hawk reached my current screen.
The process in which you had to engage to successfully combat the hawk's aerial assault was absolutely ridiculous. In order to repel the hawk, you had to execute a perfectly timed strike and do so at the required angle (the hawk would adjust its flight-level between appearances). And the process wasn't any easier even on days when I was focused and my reflexes were sharp. Even then, I'd still continuously fail to repel the hawk because the hero's movements were so slow and laggy; his inadequate responsiveness made it impossible to perfectly time strikes. So the majority of the time, I'd miss the target and consequently incur two pecks worth of damage.
The hawk's attacks weren't so crippling in the early going, when I was able to hover around 7 or 8 units of health, but they started to become a huge issue later on when the game started putting increasingly smaller caps on the automatic-health-replenishment system. At this point in the game (which, I guessed, was still well short of the halfway point), each health unit was a very precious commodity, and I simply couldn't afford to be dropping two of them at a time.
And after a while, I gave up on trying to repel the hawk. I just accepted that I was going to drop two health units every time it appeared.
I tell you: I suffered more deaths at the beak of that cursed fowl than I did at the hands of the game's most formidable karate guys. That's how deadly that creature was.
And yet there was actually something worse than the hawk. It wasn't a karate guy, a robot or a different type of killer bird, no. It was something else. It was something more sinister in design. Something much more fearsome. Something far more deadly. Something that decisively ended my life a countless number of times.
It was a gate. Or what most people would call "a gate."
I called it "the Pincer."
The Pincer was a barred gate that lied at the hall's far end. It was the biggest impediment to my advancement and the reason I almost never saw the next part of the game. It was the most difficult obstacle I'd ever encountered in a game.
If you wanted to safely pass through the self-closing gate, you had to do something very specific: First you had to bait it into closing. Immediately after, you had to back away and enter into a neutral position. Then you wait for the bars to start rising. And finally, you had to run forward when the rising bars were about 80% of the way back up. There was no other way to make it through.
The first time I encountered this gate, I didn't know (and couldn't have known) that there was a trick to passing through it. I imagined that it was no different from the previous two gates and that I could simply walk through it. So that's what I attempted to do. "Time to finally move on to the next area!" I thought to myself as I casually strutted forward, feeling very satisfied with my accomplishment.
That's when something terrible happened: As I was passing beneath the gate, its bars, in shocking fashion, slammed down on me and crushed me to death. I was impaled at multiple points and left me in a bloody heap. It was horrifying.
What disturbed me most about this event, though, was its aftermath: After the bars retracted a bit, blood began to flow out from the fallen hero's now-unplugged wounds, and soon his corpse was surrounded by a large pool of blood. And the camera lingered on this bloody scene until finally mercy arrived in the form of a blunt "The End" screen, whose accompanying ditty was as grim-sounding as you could get.
It wasn't enough for Karateka to make me feel embarrassed about having been taken out by a gate, of all things, no. It had to go much farther than that. It had to traumatize and emotionally scar me. It had to rub it in. That's the kind of game it was.
For the longest time, I assumed that the correct process for gate clearance was to start running from a distance and let your full-speed momentum carry you safely through. That seemed to be the only logical solution. But even in those moments when I was lucky enough to actually get the hero to run from a distance, I still couldn't get through. The gate would slam down on me all the same. Its closing animation was that quick.
No matter which approach I took, the story would invariably end the same way: The gate would slam down on me, and I'd suffer a bloody death.
After a while, I began to suspect that there was something wrong with the game. "Maybe it's glitched," I thought, "and some mechanical flaw is causing the gate to start closing too early."
It was either that, I figured, or a case of my being oblivious to a special control input that allowed the hero to move faster.
I couldn't say for sure what the problem was.
But that didn't stop me from attempting to pass through that gate. Over a course of weeks, I tried everything. I tried running from different points; walking as slowly as possible in order to avoid triggering the gate's "unseen sensor" (which I believed to exist); and testing every possible permutation of keyboard-and-joystick input in pursuit of discovering a special speed-boosting move.
At the least, I hoped to create a scenario in which the gate was so impressed with my improvised dance moves that it'd simply give me a break and let me through.
The only thing I remember well about the game's next part is that it took you downstairs to a bleak, barren basement area whose background was completely devoid of color and imagery. It was purely black and thus coldly uninviting. The only sign of life was a sole minion who, weirdly, wore a silver-colored horned helmet. I defeated this guy only one time, but when I did, I was too low on health to survive what followed: a seemingly endless series of single-screen rooms, each of which was occupied by a single minion.
In one particular run, I managed, somehow, to make it to the basement's fifth room (at the time, I didn't realize that this was actually the game's penultimate room), but I was taken out by the hawk, who made a surprise return and was now ready to engage me in a fight to the finish. The game was nice enough to fully replenish my health beforehand, but it didn't matter; that indomitable bird still easily tore me to pieces.
Mine was a hopeless effort.
Sadly, I was never able to confront the bell-bottomed metalhead who had kidnapped my gal. I simply couldn't survive that long.
More than anything else, I wanted to make it to Robotron just to see how he maneuvered about and engaged in combat. "How does someone who wears a tin dress walk or throw kicks?" I wondered. "And can I even hurt a metal mandroid?"
It wasn't until years later that I learned about Karateka's characters and the nature of its story. I discovered that the game's unnamed hero was on a mission to rescue his beautiful girlfriend, Princess Mariko, from the clutches of the "sinister Akuma" (who, it turns out, is a robed, masked martial artist and not a bell-bottomed robot) and his evil forces.
What I found most amusing was the bit about how Mariko would kill you if you approached her while in a fighting stance. If you did this, she'd "perceive you as an enemy" and deliver a fatal high-kick. This was extra-funny to me because I just knew that this would have been the likely outcome for my 8-year-old self. He would have walked into that prison cell all proud and excited, and then he would have fallen into a stunned silence as Mariko death-kicked him and the grim "The End" screen promptly displayed. It would have been hilarious (well, only in retrospect; at the time, considering all of the suffering I'd have endured to make it that far, I probably would have been furious).
Yet my most surprising discovery was that I'd been incorrectly pronouncing the game's title all those years. It was "cara-tekk-a," I learned, and not "carata-kuh," as I'd been saying. That one little bit of information was world-changing for me.
What remains unchanged is Karateka's value to me. It holds a special place in my heart. It did a lot of things for me. It gave me a fun new world to observe and explore. It helped to open my mind to new possibilities and show me that games had the potential to be something more. And it provided me a lot of great memories. I wasn't any good at it, no, but still I always had a great time with it. Trying to figure out its controls and competently deal with its enemies and obstacles was a maddening process at times, sure, but it was also super-interesting and a whole lot of fun.
Sometime recently, I went back and finished Karateka legitimately (and actually learned how the controls worked), and after engaging in the process, all I can say is that I have no desire to ever do it again. Playing through Karateka is an extreme test of patience, and just thinking about doing it again makes me feel mentally fatigued. I mean, it's a fine game and all, but it's just too slow, and its controls are too unresponsive-feeling. I just don't enjoy the experience.
But still, that doesn't change how I feel about Karateka. I'm very fond of it. I love what it does. I gain great enjoyment from thinking about it and reflecting upon the time I spent with it. And I continue to have a strong appreciation for its pioneering cinematic-style storytelling--for how its action and music synergize and shape the setting's atmosphere in such an amazingly unique way; for how its events occur in real-time and flow naturally; for how it uses movie-like camera techniques; and for how all of the aforementioned are able to evoke strong feelings of excitement, struggle and triumph.
Karateka is a special game to me, and that'll remain the case even if I never play it or see it again.
And I'll never forget the valuable lesson that Karateka taught me: If you're moving into a new field or taking on a new challenge, you'd better be prepared. If you don't know what you're doing, it won't be long before the gates of reality come crashing down on your head.
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