International Karate + (IK+) (1987) 
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| Publisher: Genre: Author(s): Musician(s): Minimum Memory Required: Maximum Players: Joysticks: Language: Media Code: Media Type: Country of Release: Related Titles: Comments: |  System 3Fighting Archer MacLean Rob Hubbard 64K 1 Yes Eng N/A Audio cassette USA International Karate Re-released on budget label Hit Squad in 1988 | Click to choose platform: Amstrad CPC Commodore 64 Sinclair ZX Spectrum |
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Unknown (Edge) 25th Nov 2010 06:11The Making of International Karate+
===================================
Format: C64
Realease: 1987
Publisher: Activision
Developer: Archer Maclean
IK+’s addition of a third combatant was a masterstroke. The likes of Way Of The Exploding Fist and the C64 version of International Karate (but not the risible Spectrum release, with which Archer Maclean had no involvement) had already explored the possibilities inherent in one-on-one bouts on the hardware of the time. Maclean’s third fighter gave IK+ an entirely different feel: chaotic, fraught, a pace that made its peers seem pedestrian by comparison.
“Was the three-player concept present from the start?” echoes Maclean today. “Yeah, absolutely. I had the idea at the back end of the IK1 development. I wanted to introduce the third player because it meant it was a free-for-all melee: one player against two computer players, two players against each other and a computer player, or two players against a computer player – you were given the choice to cooperate.”
The joy of IK+ was its repertoire of moves, some of which were far more ambitious than other fighting games of the time. “One of my favourites is the headbutt, because it’s quick – there are two frames of animation – and the speed is pretty spot on,” says Maclean. “Another, and it was spectacular if you got it right, was the double face kick. It was actually inspired by Jackie Chan in The Cannonball Run. There’s one point where he’s having a fight with two bikers, and he suddenly jumps up and cracks both of them in the face at the same time. It’s very, very impressive – and apparently it was real, he really did break one guy’s jaw. I just looked at it and thought, wow, I’ve got to have that, and then spent ages trying to draw it.”
Although he has no formal artistic training, Maclean was responsible for all of IK+’s visuals. “I’ve always been able to draw or animate cartoons, although it’s often a very painstaking process,” he admits. “There were loads of karate games around at the time, Karate Champ, Fist – which was a big favourite of mine – and a lot of them featured the same sort of moves. I wanted to do something that was different.
“Now, to do something like the backflip – which hadn’t been put in a game before – I tried all sorts of things. One was just drawing it, but I couldn’t get the flow of it right. Then I went out and bought a video camera, and filmed myself jumping around. That didn’t work, either. I looked at hundreds of cartoons, karate films, all kinds of movies, looking for these moves I wanted. One was the backflip – I wanted it to be a way of quickly escaping or moving from one point to another faster than walking. Now, to get this, I needed footage.
“One afternoon I happened to be watching Grease with my girlfriend. At the very end of it there’s a fairground scene… and in the background, sideways on, there’s a guy doing a backflip. I watched it over and over and over, and said: that’s it! A real person, doing a proper backflip. It was perfect.”
Equipped with an expensive video recorder with a suitably static pause function, Maclean performed minor surgery on his television, opening and adjusting it in order to vertically ‘stretch’ the figure to the size he required for IK+. “I then placed a piece of cellophane over the TV, froze the frame, then drew an outline around it with a pen,” he reveals. “I’d advance it by around two frames then draw the next piece of animation. I did dozens. I then took the cellophane and put it over my computer screen, painstakingly recreating each image in pixels. That then formed the primitive ‘motion capture’ which gave me the speed of body movement through the air in realtime. That’s how I did it.”
“One of my favourite moves is the headbutt, because it’s quick – there are two frames of animation – and the speed is pretty spot on. Another was the double face kick. It was actually inspired by Jackie Chan in The Cannonball Run. There’s one point where he’s having a fight with two bikers, and he suddenly jumps up and cracks both of them in the face at the same time. I just looked at it and thought, wow, I’ve got to have that, and then spent ages trying to draw it.” Archer Maclean
The development of IK+’s AI was, though prosaic by comparison, no less efficient. “It was easy, basically,” Maclean boasts. “In those days, it wasn’t even called AI – we would have called it ‘fighting logic’, or something. The whole thing was based on look-up tables of what moves to use based on how far away the opponent was. The game obviously knows which move, if it were used, would lead to a direct hit at that point in time. For the easy difficulty level, right at the start, the computer fighters would, 90 per cent of the time, look at what the best move would be and then ignore it. As the level of difficulty increased that percentage would drop, until level 25 or thereabouts where it would be 95 per cent accurate. It worked beautifully.”
One of IK+’s most memorable features was its excellent sound design. With background accompaniment provided by Rob Hubbard’s famous score – later recreated by Dave Lowe for the 16bit iterations – Maclean dedicated a lot of effort to polishing and perfecting its spot effects. “The one sound effect that everyone remembers is the shin kick, where you do a Bruce Lee-style sound,” he says, before performing it with uncanny accuracy. “I spent a lot of time shouting into microphones,” he laughs.
The 4bit samples of the C64 version – cleaned up for Amiga and ST releases – imbued every move, every successful blow, with a raw but satisfying power contemporary beat ’em ups rarely, if ever, seem to rival. One particularly clever piece of audio design could also be found in IK+’s ball-deflecting bonus round. As the speed of the projectiles increased, the pitch of the balls hitting the player’s shield rises in a manner Maclean likens to Space Invaders, increasing the tension in a subtle but powerful manner. “I wanted the sound effects to make people sweat,” he recalls.
Working initially with the limited C64 hardware, Maclean admits that he had to sacrifice certain features. One idea he had was that the plateau on which players fight had four views that would rotate between bouts. Players would watch the sun set on one side, before watching the moon disappear on the opposite. Disappointed with the ‘dead’ static backdrops of International Karate, he opted for a compromise: “I didn’t want to waste RAM on static backdrops. That’s why I went with the one backdrop, but animated it – and that added a lot of atmosphere.”
Maclean also toyed with the prospect of a three-player mode: “I wanted to put that in, and the code could have coped with it,” he recalls. “The problem was you only had two joystick ports, so one would have been on the keyboard – which, on a fast action game, I didn’t want.”
Although the C64 original was packed with incidental animations and Easter eggs, Maclean added many codes and key commands to the 16bit versions, many of which revealed hidden messages. Some of these, he says, have yet to be discovered. “There are about 60. Some of them react to specific swearwords – and if you type in too many, the game would reset,” he sniggers. Such incidental details seem to please Maclean greatly; you get the impression that he genuinely had fun developing IK+.
What, looking back, is he most proud of? “I think it’s the fluidity of the animation, and the way you felt connected to the moves you were doing,” he states. “And the little things – the sloping shadows, the way the leaves fell from the tree and piled up on the ground. There was actually a maximum of 30 leaves that could be displayed, and when it got to that point, a little worm would crawl across. That’s what the worm was for – to eat the leaves!
“I was extremely happy with IK+. I just used to sit there and look at it in wonderment at what I’d created. I knew that I’d created something really special. Few people saw it until the end, apart from a few people at Activision who had to see how I was getting on, and they couldn’t get hold of it quick enough. Even now, 17 years on, people are still talking about it. Thousands and thousands of games have been released since then, and to have people remember it is amazing.”
This rather begs the question: with so many former devotees recalling it with fondness, and rehashes released for the PlayStation and Game Boy Advance, plus a version is now available on Wii's Virtual Console, can we ever expect a true sequel to IK+, to finally play the IK++ that was rumoured to be in development? Is this likely?
“It’s definite, full stop,” laughs Maclean - and this is him speaking back in 2004. “But it’s not going to be just another button-basher,” he states. “I want to go back to the good old days of simple controls, fluidity of motion and skill required… but with a big, big game behind it.” Five years later, though, we're still holding our breath.
This is an edited version of an article which originally appeared in E139.
===================================
Format: C64
Realease: 1987
Publisher: Activision
Developer: Archer Maclean
IK+’s addition of a third combatant was a masterstroke. The likes of Way Of The Exploding Fist and the C64 version of International Karate (but not the risible Spectrum release, with which Archer Maclean had no involvement) had already explored the possibilities inherent in one-on-one bouts on the hardware of the time. Maclean’s third fighter gave IK+ an entirely different feel: chaotic, fraught, a pace that made its peers seem pedestrian by comparison.
“Was the three-player concept present from the start?” echoes Maclean today. “Yeah, absolutely. I had the idea at the back end of the IK1 development. I wanted to introduce the third player because it meant it was a free-for-all melee: one player against two computer players, two players against each other and a computer player, or two players against a computer player – you were given the choice to cooperate.”
The joy of IK+ was its repertoire of moves, some of which were far more ambitious than other fighting games of the time. “One of my favourites is the headbutt, because it’s quick – there are two frames of animation – and the speed is pretty spot on,” says Maclean. “Another, and it was spectacular if you got it right, was the double face kick. It was actually inspired by Jackie Chan in The Cannonball Run. There’s one point where he’s having a fight with two bikers, and he suddenly jumps up and cracks both of them in the face at the same time. It’s very, very impressive – and apparently it was real, he really did break one guy’s jaw. I just looked at it and thought, wow, I’ve got to have that, and then spent ages trying to draw it.”
Although he has no formal artistic training, Maclean was responsible for all of IK+’s visuals. “I’ve always been able to draw or animate cartoons, although it’s often a very painstaking process,” he admits. “There were loads of karate games around at the time, Karate Champ, Fist – which was a big favourite of mine – and a lot of them featured the same sort of moves. I wanted to do something that was different.
“Now, to do something like the backflip – which hadn’t been put in a game before – I tried all sorts of things. One was just drawing it, but I couldn’t get the flow of it right. Then I went out and bought a video camera, and filmed myself jumping around. That didn’t work, either. I looked at hundreds of cartoons, karate films, all kinds of movies, looking for these moves I wanted. One was the backflip – I wanted it to be a way of quickly escaping or moving from one point to another faster than walking. Now, to get this, I needed footage.
“One afternoon I happened to be watching Grease with my girlfriend. At the very end of it there’s a fairground scene… and in the background, sideways on, there’s a guy doing a backflip. I watched it over and over and over, and said: that’s it! A real person, doing a proper backflip. It was perfect.”
Equipped with an expensive video recorder with a suitably static pause function, Maclean performed minor surgery on his television, opening and adjusting it in order to vertically ‘stretch’ the figure to the size he required for IK+. “I then placed a piece of cellophane over the TV, froze the frame, then drew an outline around it with a pen,” he reveals. “I’d advance it by around two frames then draw the next piece of animation. I did dozens. I then took the cellophane and put it over my computer screen, painstakingly recreating each image in pixels. That then formed the primitive ‘motion capture’ which gave me the speed of body movement through the air in realtime. That’s how I did it.”
“One of my favourite moves is the headbutt, because it’s quick – there are two frames of animation – and the speed is pretty spot on. Another was the double face kick. It was actually inspired by Jackie Chan in The Cannonball Run. There’s one point where he’s having a fight with two bikers, and he suddenly jumps up and cracks both of them in the face at the same time. I just looked at it and thought, wow, I’ve got to have that, and then spent ages trying to draw it.” Archer Maclean
The development of IK+’s AI was, though prosaic by comparison, no less efficient. “It was easy, basically,” Maclean boasts. “In those days, it wasn’t even called AI – we would have called it ‘fighting logic’, or something. The whole thing was based on look-up tables of what moves to use based on how far away the opponent was. The game obviously knows which move, if it were used, would lead to a direct hit at that point in time. For the easy difficulty level, right at the start, the computer fighters would, 90 per cent of the time, look at what the best move would be and then ignore it. As the level of difficulty increased that percentage would drop, until level 25 or thereabouts where it would be 95 per cent accurate. It worked beautifully.”
One of IK+’s most memorable features was its excellent sound design. With background accompaniment provided by Rob Hubbard’s famous score – later recreated by Dave Lowe for the 16bit iterations – Maclean dedicated a lot of effort to polishing and perfecting its spot effects. “The one sound effect that everyone remembers is the shin kick, where you do a Bruce Lee-style sound,” he says, before performing it with uncanny accuracy. “I spent a lot of time shouting into microphones,” he laughs.
The 4bit samples of the C64 version – cleaned up for Amiga and ST releases – imbued every move, every successful blow, with a raw but satisfying power contemporary beat ’em ups rarely, if ever, seem to rival. One particularly clever piece of audio design could also be found in IK+’s ball-deflecting bonus round. As the speed of the projectiles increased, the pitch of the balls hitting the player’s shield rises in a manner Maclean likens to Space Invaders, increasing the tension in a subtle but powerful manner. “I wanted the sound effects to make people sweat,” he recalls.
Working initially with the limited C64 hardware, Maclean admits that he had to sacrifice certain features. One idea he had was that the plateau on which players fight had four views that would rotate between bouts. Players would watch the sun set on one side, before watching the moon disappear on the opposite. Disappointed with the ‘dead’ static backdrops of International Karate, he opted for a compromise: “I didn’t want to waste RAM on static backdrops. That’s why I went with the one backdrop, but animated it – and that added a lot of atmosphere.”
Maclean also toyed with the prospect of a three-player mode: “I wanted to put that in, and the code could have coped with it,” he recalls. “The problem was you only had two joystick ports, so one would have been on the keyboard – which, on a fast action game, I didn’t want.”
Although the C64 original was packed with incidental animations and Easter eggs, Maclean added many codes and key commands to the 16bit versions, many of which revealed hidden messages. Some of these, he says, have yet to be discovered. “There are about 60. Some of them react to specific swearwords – and if you type in too many, the game would reset,” he sniggers. Such incidental details seem to please Maclean greatly; you get the impression that he genuinely had fun developing IK+.
What, looking back, is he most proud of? “I think it’s the fluidity of the animation, and the way you felt connected to the moves you were doing,” he states. “And the little things – the sloping shadows, the way the leaves fell from the tree and piled up on the ground. There was actually a maximum of 30 leaves that could be displayed, and when it got to that point, a little worm would crawl across. That’s what the worm was for – to eat the leaves!
“I was extremely happy with IK+. I just used to sit there and look at it in wonderment at what I’d created. I knew that I’d created something really special. Few people saw it until the end, apart from a few people at Activision who had to see how I was getting on, and they couldn’t get hold of it quick enough. Even now, 17 years on, people are still talking about it. Thousands and thousands of games have been released since then, and to have people remember it is amazing.”
This rather begs the question: with so many former devotees recalling it with fondness, and rehashes released for the PlayStation and Game Boy Advance, plus a version is now available on Wii's Virtual Console, can we ever expect a true sequel to IK+, to finally play the IK++ that was rumoured to be in development? Is this likely?
“It’s definite, full stop,” laughs Maclean - and this is him speaking back in 2004. “But it’s not going to be just another button-basher,” he states. “I want to go back to the good old days of simple controls, fluidity of motion and skill required… but with a big, big game behind it.” Five years later, though, we're still holding our breath.
This is an edited version of an article which originally appeared in E139.
Dion Guy (Virtual Console (http://vc.nintendolife.com)) 23rd Nov 2010 10:42
Issue 31 (Zzap! 64) 14th Mar 2011 10:51| Cheats | Trivia |
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This title was first added on 4th November 2009
This title was most recently updated on 14th March 2011