Karatekacame out
of a lot of ideas all kind
of converging at the
same time. Choplifter
showed me what was
possible in terms of
smooth scrolling and an
original game design.
Meanwhile, I was get-
ting megadoses of
exposure to cinema;
Yale had about a dozen
film societies and I was
trying to see in four
years every film ever
made. Seven Samurai
was my new favorite film of all time. My mom at that time was heavily into karate, and I
had taken a few lessons during the summer down at the local dojo. Finally, I was taking
film studies classes (always dangerous) and starting to get delusions of grandeur that
computer games were in the infancy of a new art form, like cartoon animation in the
’20s or film in the 1900s. So all those sources of inspiration got rolled intoKarateka.
What made the big difference was using a Super 8 camera to film my karate teacher
going through the moves, and tracing them frame by frame on a Moviola. It was
rotoscoping, the same trick that Disney had used forSnow Whiteback in the ’30s. That
made the animation look a lot better than I could have done by hand and better than the
other games that were out there. I worked onKaratekafor a couple of years between
classes, and sent it to Broderbund at about the end of my sophomore year. They were
pleased and published it.
So one of your goals was to merge cinematic techniques with an action game to
create a unique hybrid?
Very definitely. The accelerating cross-cutting to create suspense had been used by
D.W. Griffith in 1915; I figured it should be tried in a computer game. The horizontal
wipe for transition between scenes I lifted fromSeven Samurai. The scrolling text pro-
logue at the beginning. And silly things, like saying THE END instead of GAME OVER.
I used the few techniques that I could figure out how to pull off in hi-res graphics on an
Apple II.
Karateka’s actually quite short. Was that a deliberate decision, to keep the
game focused?
Well, it didn’t seem short to me at the time. Actually, when I submitted it to Broderbund
it only had one level: you’d enter the palace and have the fight. One of the first things
they suggested to me was to have three different levels: you’re outside, you’re in the
palace, then you’re down below. I wasn’t thinking in terms of hours of play, I just wanted
to make it cool.
322 Chapter 18: Interview: Jordan Mechner
Karateka