If you were to tell the history of a classic video game, what better format to use than a video game itself? That's the idea behind the interactive experience The Making of Karateka.
Karateka is a side-scrolling fighting game first released by Broderbund in 1984, so your grandfather might have played it on his Apple II computer. I had an Apple II in the 1980s, and if we had owned Karateka, it would have been many levels above the games that we actually played on that computer. Karateka is still playable, but in order to understand how innovative it was at one time, you need to get a taste of the era, and learn the story of how it came to be. The Making of Karateka puts you into that place and time, with teenage game developer Jordan Mechner.
The Making of Karateka will leave you not only more understanding of the game itself and the state of video game innovation in the 1980s, but also an appreciation for the creative process that drove Mechner and other video game pioneers to launch new ideas. Those ideas built on each other to bring us the technical and artistic leaps that led us to the hyper-realistic games we play today. Kotaku tells us more about The Making of Karateka and how it will boost your appreciation for video games as a whole. And you'll find out the genius reason that bird was so annoying.