4. The Making of Karateka

In my introduction, I said that 2023 has been a year of big swings. It’s fitting, then, that The Making of Karateka lets us look back at one of the most ambitious and successful endeavors in early gaming history, a big swing that paid off in a big way. Packed with new interviews and archival materials, Digital Eclipse’s “playable documentary” gives Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner’s 1984 smash Karateka the Criterion Collection treatment. Mechner’s journals from the period inform our understanding of the creative impulses that drove him to create the landmark action game, for instance, while other resources illuminate the ways in which he drew on cinema to shape its storytelling and design.

Read More: This ‘Playable Documentary’ About A 1984 Classic Is One Of The Year’s Best Games

Preserving game history is much more than a matter of just keeping raw files on computers. If we truly believe that games are an important creative medium whose history is worth saving, then it’s a matter of telling the stories around games, humanizing the artists who made them, understanding the technical limitations they were operating under and the business challenges they faced. We understand the need to do this with art forms like cinema and music, but games remain behind the curve. There’s hope, however. The Making of Karateka is billed as the first in what Digital Eclipse is calling its Gold Master series. A second is already on the way. With any luck, we’ll soon begin to see numerous publishers putting out an entire range of deep dives into classic games.