Review: The Making of Karateka is a superbly curated interactive documentary
Over the past few years, Digital Eclipse has cemented its status as the leading developer and publisher of retro compilations.
While some other studios are content to gather a bunch of game ROMs and bundle them with a rudimentary emulator, Digital Eclipse supports its games with a wealth of features and supplementary materials, to the extent that even if you don’t care about the games being featured in one of its compilations, you’d still be wise to pick it up.
The pinnacle of Digital Eclipse’s achievements to date has been Atari 50, a mind-boggling journey through the history of Atari which takes place over a number of interactive timelines and contains video interviews, high quality imagery and no fewer than 103 Atari games to play.
Atari 50’s structure was so well-crafted that Digital Eclipse has wisely decided to replicate it for the Gold Master Series, a new line of titles that takes individual titles and gives them the ‘interactive museum’ treatment as seen in Atari 50.
The first of these is The Making of Karateka, based on the first published game by Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner. And if it’s an indicator of how the rest of the Gold Master Series is going to go, retro gaming enthusiasts should be extremely excited.
What you get for your $19.99 / £16.74 is, much like in Atari 50, a set of timelines that follow the story of key moments in the making of the game. The first deals with Deathbounce, the first major game Mechner tried (and ultimately failed) to get published.
The second timeline covers the early planning stages for Karateka, the third has a close look at the rotoscoping animation technique he used for the game, the fourth focuses on the global marketing the game received, the final timeline looks at
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