Jordan Mechner’s classic action game Karateka turns into an interactive documentary

Digital Eclipse, a company specialized in working with emulators and which dedicates part of its activity to the preservation of video games, has announced the Gold Master Series initiative. It is a program that presents classic games in an interactive documentary format that collects and shares the history of the titles and their creators. It can also be played. The title with which the Gold Master Series will be released will be Karateka (1984), the first game developed by Jordan Mechner, creator of Prince of Persia, while he was attending Yale University.

The Making of Karateka, this is the name of the first installment of the Gold Master Series, includes versions pixel perfect of the original installments of Karateka “with an excellent graphic quality” and a variety of “never seen” prototypes, with current features such as the possibility of saving at any time, rewinding, selecting a chapter and listening to the director’s comments. There is also a remastered version of Karateka that features new content, commentary, logos, and more. In its mechner personal blog says that Digital Eclipse’s work with Karateka Remastered “is much more than a remaster.”

Among the content of The Making of Karateka we also find Deathbounce: Rebounded, a new version of deathbounce. Before creating Prince of Persia and during his first year at university, Mechner developed a game called Deathbounce for the Apple II, but Doug Carlston, founder of Broderbund Software, refused to release it. The project remained in limbo until in 2012 it was shared by Mechner. Those interested will find it available for download at Internet Archive. Deathbounce is a variant of Asteroids and Digital Eclipse has created Deathbounce: Rebounded based on Mechner’s prototype.

Although Karateka and its remaster will be playable, the goal of the Gold Master Series initiative goes much further. In this case, it will be discovered “how Karateka became one of the first games to include cinematic sequences, a moving original soundtrack, rotoscopic animation and a Hollywood-style love story that influenced subsequent games for decades,” explains the team. developmental. This is a similar initiative to Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration, also created by Digital Eclipse, but more ambitious and with independent installments focused on a single game.

“The Gold Master Series is something we’ve been planning for a long time at Digital Eclipse: independent projects that honor the designers, studios, and games that changed the world,” says Chris Kohler of Digital Eclipse. “Our mission is to enhance these games, presenting them in the best possible light and placing them in their historical context, an approach we have dubbed ‘interactive documentary’.”

The Making of Karateka will be available this year for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam.