New Karateka game in development. Prince of Persia creator onboard

30 July 2008

Posted by:Josh

A new Karateka game is in development and the creator of Prince of Persia is directly involved, as was revealed during a Q&A panel at Comic-Con 2008.

Jordan Mechner is the creator of the original Prince of Persia, as well as some less-famous games including Karateka and The Last Express.

If you’ve never heard of Karateka, it was a Mechnar’s first commercial video game he developed, an early 2D fighter published by Broderbund in 1984 when he was attending Yale University. It is most well known for it’s fluid animation, which laid the groundwork for his influential and best-selling 1989 classic Prince of Persia. At a Comic-Con 2008 panel where he was discussing all things Prince of Persia, he was also pelted with many questions about his previous games, and that’s where he revealed that his newest project is indeed an all-new Karateka game, and that he would be directly involved in it’s creation, a claim he didn’t make for the Prince of Persia revival.

Although no details on the game were revealed, he did tease the crowd by stating, “There actually is a plan to bring back Karateka. It’s a project I’m going to be involved in. I can safely say it’s not going to be in the way you expect.”

Responding to a separate question about the original Karateka, Mechner recounted how he and one of the game’s other programmers pulled off one of gaming’s stranger Easter eggs . . . turning the playfield upside down.

“The programmer doing copy protection for the game figured out that by messing with the bit table, the whole game could be played upside down, which is really hard to do,” he explained. “We thought it would be hilarious if we burned the flipped version of the game to the other side of the disk.

“We figured of all the people who buy the game, a couple of them would accidentally put the floppy in upside down,” he continued. “That way, when that person calls tech support, that tech support rep would once in blue moon have the sublime joy of saying, ‘Well sir, you put the disk in upside down,’ and that person would think for the rest of their live that’s how software works.”

As it turned out, brass at publisher Broderbund was receptive to the idea: “We went do the president of Broderbund to propose this, and we didn’t think they’d go for it, because it would require an assembly line change to actually burn the game onto both sides of the disk, which adds however many cents. So we went in, and he said, ‘Sure. Do it.’”