Final 12 months, Digital Eclipse launched Atari 50, a sprawling, interactive tour by means of Atari’s lengthy historical past. I described it as “a cross between an interactive documentary and a digital museum exhibition,” and it actually set a brand new bar for retro recreation collections. Now, the studio is tackling one other undertaking: Karateka, the sport Jordan Mechner made earlier than the long-lasting Prince of Persia.
Known as The Making of Karateka, the brand new undertaking sounds very similar to Atari 50, solely centered on a particular recreation. It contains “pixel-perfect variations” of the unique Karateka releases and early prototypes you possibly can really play, together with a bunch of design paperwork and documentary-style video options. There’s even a brand-new remastered model of the motion recreation. “What they’ve constructed round my 1984 kicking-punching debut is a lot greater than a recreation remaster, I’m nonetheless making an attempt to wrap my thoughts round it,” Mechner wrote on his personal blog.
The studio additionally says that the sport is simply the primary in a brand new assortment it’s calling the “Gold Grasp Collection.” Principally, the concept is to provide plenty of influential video games the Atari 50 remedy.
“The Gold Grasp Collection is one thing we’ve been planning for a very long time right here at Digital Eclipse – independently-produced tasks that remember key designers, studios, and video games that modified the world,” Digital Eclipse’s Chris Kohler wrote in a post announcing the series. “Our mission is to raise these video games, presenting them of their very best mild whereas placing them of their correct historic context, an method we’ve dubbed the ‘interactive documentary.’”
Given how impactful Karateka was for motion video games, it’s an amazing place to begin. The Making of Karateka doesn’t presently have a launch date, but it surely’s slated to launch this 12 months on Xbox, PlayStation, PC, and the Nintendo Swap.
