Introducing Karateka Classic
Update: Karateka Classic is now live in the App Store and on Google Play.
I’ve heard from a lot of people who’ve expressed the desire to replay a certain 1984 side-scrolling, bird-punching game that traumatized them in childhood, exactly the way they remember it — on their mobile devices.
So, by popular demand, I’m happy to announce that Karateka Classic is coming to the App Store and Google Play this Thursday. It’s not a remake, not a port, but a faithful pixel-perfect emulation of the original Apple II game, with Olivier Goguel’s ActiveGS emulator running my 6502 assembly language code, graphics, and my dad’s music.
In engineering the app, Olivier has added a number of nifty touches, including the ability to choose between color CRT, amber, or green screen, as well as a few touchscreen-friendly updates, and a certain peculiarity of the 5.25″ floppy disk version which I won’t spoil here.
I’ll be curious to hear your thoughts. Does Karateka Classic match your memories? How does it compare to the Karateka remake? And is it better to kick, or always punch the hawk?
Download links will be posted here late Wednesday night. Oh, and the price will be 99 cents.
Templar Tumblr
Less than two months to go until Templar’s release! Today, we’re inaugurating a Tumblr page for the book. We’ll be posting all things Templar there, including announcements of upcoming events, and behind-the-scenes materials from artists LeUyen Pham and Alexandre Puvilland and me.
Two events are already on the calendar: If you’re in L.A. on July 9 (the day the book launches), come by Skylight Books in Los Feliz, where I’ll be doing a reading/signing and Q&A. The following week, I’ll be at San Diego Comic-Con (event details TBA).
Meanwhile, see you on Tumblr!
Revisiting The Shadow and the Flame
Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame was released for PCs in 1993 — three years after the prince’s original Apple II debut, and a full decade before his leap to 21st-century consoles with PoP: The Sands of Time. I’ve posted a lot about my work process on the other PoPs, but almost nothing about this one.
To jog my memory, I dug out of my archives the game design “bible” I created for the PoP2 dev team in 1991. It’s a curious artifact of that era; you can download the PDF (19MB) if you’re interested.
Why I hate bibles, and made one anyway
There was no “bible” for the original PoP. That game evolved over four years in an organic process of improvisation, trial and error. The level design — the balance of action, exploration and combat that gave the game its particular flavor — came together only in the final few months. I had the liberty to do it that way because I was game designer, animator, and programmer, working on my own with no fixed timetable or budget.
Writing a detailed 200-page bible, then handing it to a team and saying “Make this” is the complete opposite way to start a project, and it’s almost always a terrible idea. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. But that’s how PoP2 was made. It worked because of a peculiar combination of reasons:
- I’d already made PoP1. The idea for PoP2 was to basically make PoP 1.5: keep the existing PoP1 code, animation, and gameplay, add souped-up graphics, a few new twists, traps and enemies, and build twelve new levels. Designing the entire game on paper was possible because it was just similar enough to the original that everyone could easily imagine how it would look, sound and feel to play.
- I was 3,000 miles away. The team was in California, and I was living in New York, about to move to Paris. In those pre-internet days, communication was by fax and long-distance phone calls, with game builds and data sent on floppy disks in DHL envelopes. I knew I wouldn’t be on site often enough to permit fast iteration and tight feedback loops. So it made sense to spell everything out ahead of time.
- We had a budget. Broderbund was a conservative studio and PoP2 was the biggest internal game project they’d ever done. They were already nervous about doing such a graphics-intensive project, and wouldn’t have signed off on it without a design document that gave them confidence
that the cost estimates were solid. - The team actually followed the bible. If the on-site team had included a creative director, my bible would have been obsolete by month two. Games evolve so quickly that any design that gets put on paper is usually out of date by the time anyone reads it. This is why making a detailed bible is usually a waste of time. PoP2 was the rare situation where the studio and team were united in wanting to faithfully execute the design I gave them — and I was safely off-site where there was less danger I might get inspired to improve it.
For all these reasons, it made sense to have a bible. It’s interesting to read it now and see how it compares to the final game. There were cuts and trims, for the usual budget/schedule reasons (the blow-by-blow story of the game development is in the second volume of my old journals) — but I’m most struck by how much was kept, and how faithfully it was executed.
The Shadow and the Flame burns again
To the many readers who have posted asking for a version of The Shadow and The Flame to play on mobile devices, I’m happy to report that Ubisoft has just announced a modern “remastered” version for smartphones and tablets.
The mobile Prince of Persia: The Shadow and the Flame will feature updated graphics, sound, and touch controls in the spirit of Prince of Persia Classic, rather than a direct port of the original like 2010′s Prince of Persia Retro. Here’s a link to the trailer. For myself, I’m looking forward to trying to beat the game again, twenty years later.
Questions & Answers (Spoiler Alert!)
Announcing Templar
I’m excited to announce that my original graphic novel Templar will be published in July in its entirety as a 480-page, full-color hardcover from First Second. (Book one of the saga was previously published in 2010 as an individual paperback, Solomon’s Thieves.)
It’s a hefty tome. Artists LeUyen Pham and Alex Puvilland have outdone themselves, evoking 14th-century Paris with all the action, humor, and depth a writer could hope for. I’m immensely proud of this book, and I can’t wait for you to discover it.
Templar will ship on July 9, 2013. You can pre-order it from Amazon here.
Watch the Templar facebook page for updates about book events and other news.
Karateka in the App Store
I’m happy to announce that for the first time since 1984, Karateka is once again available for state-of-the-art Apple devices. You can download it for iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch in the App Store. (Karateka requires iPhone 4S or newer, iPad 2 or newer, or 5th generation iPod Touch.)
And if you don’t have an iOS device, the new remake is also out on Sony Playstation, Xbox 360, and PC. Don’t forget to punch the hawk!
