International Karate+
1987, System 3 Software
originally played on Commodore 64
Sometimes you just have to beat a
person down. Punches in the face, kicks to the ribs, whatever. We can tell each
other that we shouldn’t, but the reality is that we love the pleasure of overcoming
our own weaknesses by overcoming the weaknesses of some other fuck. Especially
through punches to the face, in fact. Of course, with most respectable elements
of society thoroughly frowning upon violence – unless it gets ritualised for
financial gain through military conquest and sports, or is hidden as slave wages
within industrial society – there are only a few outlets for the realisation of
this pleasure. Mainly, there’s the whole ‘trying to be a civilised person’
thing that most people won’t shut the fuck up about. And so we have violent
films and videogames and aren’t we all so much better for them. Surely.
One reason for the goodness of violent media is that they
let my brother and I punch each other in the head without damaging our future
cognition-oriented careers. My own enjoyment from mediated martial arts was
provoked by an unsuccessful attempt to learn aikido, a failure caused not by
lack of discipline or coordination but by my inability to pay for classes. From
grades four through eight the school board subsidised a month-long period of
phys ed lessons (called ‘options’) in activities expensive for kids such as hockey,
football, skiing, dancing, and one or two martial arts. For a lot of us, this
was the only time we could do some of those kinds of things. Equipment rentals
were a cost I couldn’t afford, so martial arts and dancing were my choices. The
military industrial toy complex which ascended with Star Wars and patterned masculinities into rigid forms of
consumption and behaviour rested its guiding hand on my shoulder – aikido it
was. Four weeks of twelve lessons and I was hooked and like a junkie I couldn’t
afford to continue.
Martial arts culture was everywhere in the 1980s and early
‘90s, the west having rejected pop trends for pacifist and spiritual elements
of eastern culture in the ‘60s and ‘70s in favour of a mythologized culture of violence
and discipline anachronically appropriated from the aristocratic warrior class,
and which was more easily commodified than Indian ragas and Buddhist meditation, Beatles be damned. Toy weapons and war-themed action figures were
best-sellers in major department stores, ninjas made cameo appearances on
late-night television, and the philosophy of the samurai code was adopted by
Wall Street wolves. Right-wing teenage male power fantasies such as American Ninja, Lone Wolf McQuaid, Big Trouble in Little China, and The Karate Kid
linked the libertarian elevation of individual agency with the conservative
desire for social order, deference to authority and tradition, and personal discipline, all captured in the symbol of the ninja superhero.
New martial-arts action superstars emerged, as Bruce Lee, Chuck
Norris, Stephen Segal, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Jackie Chan replaced the
gun-toting Dad types of the previous generation such as Charles Bronson, Gene Hackman,
Charlton Heston, and Clint Eastwood. ‘Martial Arts’ was its own section in
video rental stores, often next to the horror section as gloriously shitty (and
often quasi-amateur) b-movie and direct-to-video releases like Enter the Ninja, Miami Connection, and Ninja III: The Domination as well as badly-dubbed Asian imports like Ten Tigers of Kwangtung, Five Element Ninjas and Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky were much
more violent and weird than the Hollywood mainstream. It wasn’t long before
every action hero and pretty much anyone involved in a fight on television and in the movies was able to break out
top-drawer fighting techniques without breaking a sweat or ever appearing to train.
Of course Van Damme and Segal can turn every encounter with a bad guy into a death
ballet; that’s fine and no one has a problem accepting that. But the sheer
absurdity of a non-stop stream of anachronistic ninja clans proliferating in
contemporary crime syndicates and police departments quickly overstayed its
welcome, and guns once again emerged as the cinematic death tools of choice,
mainly because any idiot can shoot ninjas dead without much hassle. Action film
and television retreated from action stars being preternatural jujitsu masters with
convenient helicopter piloting skills to their mastering an amorphous, generic,
rapid-edit fighting style suitable for exploitation within a broad range of distinctive
genres: witness the culturally-indistinct fight styles presented in modern James Bond films, superhero franchises, revenge
films like Taken, or the Jason Bourne series. Suddenly, every IRL
wimpy non-fighter from Matt Damon to Scarlett Johansson to the old man version
of Harrison Ford can be made to look like a kickass fighter. Perhaps it’s even
more ludicrous to cast Liam Neeson as a Dad assassin than it is to use ninjas
in a bank heist, but fuck it. For big-budget entertainment, production
efficiencies have always punched logic in the head.
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| stellar power lines |
Wimpy white people kicking ass on screen is one legacy of 1980s
martial arts culture. Another was its influence on hiphop, figuring not among
the fashion trends of street culture and the videotape fetishism of mainstream ‘90s
rap, but also in the ritualised emcee battles which replicate ninjitsu agility and
Shinto philosophies in language. And of course, a videogame genre emerged
focused on martial combat, staring with traditional martial arts before
exploring more fantastic, cartoon-like themes, and this is where my virtual
fist most often struck my brother’s virtual face.
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| stay down |
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| IK+ motivates everyone to greatness |
The 1987 UK release from System 3 on Commodore 64 (released the
following year as Chop N Drop by
Activision in North America) is perhaps the most well-known version of the
game, thanks to pirating but more importantly because of Rob Hubbard’s fantastic score, which fully exploited the famously idiosyncratic SID chip in
the C64. The 1988 releases for 16-bit Atari and Amiga computers feature
significantly upgraded sound, graphics, and animation, with detailed character sprites
and very fluid motion, although Hubbard’s score was replaced with the kind of percussion-heavy
‘80s midi funk which soundtracked movies plotted around Kawasaki ninja attacks.
Two-player videogame duels are the oldest form of digital
games, with the earliest games relying on human players to provide gameplay
when artificial intelligence and enemy strategy algorithms were non-existent or
in their infancy as processor and storage requirements for artificial opponents
were too high. (For comparison, IBM’s Deep Blue chess machine – the first to
beat a grandmaster human opponent in 1997 – used 30 central processors and 480 specialised
chips). Once artificial opponents did start to appear in digital games, intelligence
routines were often simulated rather than actually computed in real time,
leading to the necessity for pattern recognition of enemy behaviour to succeed
in games (and infinite play once the patterns are learned). Of course, games which were not played in real time but were instead
turn based, such as many strategy and role-playing games, could more readily
implement intelligence routines. The inevitable progression of computational capability has allowed for the utilization of increasingly
complex intelligence routines. The first digital game – 1962 mainframe-based Spacewar – predated arcades and was an
academic marvel of violent destruction as grad students and professors took
turns lasering the living shit out of each other. Spacewar came to arcades in the form of 1971’s Galaxy Game and Computer Space. Many of the early and mid-70s arcade games such as 1972’s Pong, 1975’s Gun Fight, and 1976’s Barricade
required two players to operate, as did Atari VCS launch title Combat. As computer hardware continues to develop, digital game players have continued to engage in multiplayer
mayhem, although in the 1980s and early ‘90s competitive social gaming occurred
more often in arcades than in the home. The release of Doom in 1993 and Warcraft in 1994 inaugurated a new era of competitive multiplayer
gaming, a phenomenon centred on networked digital computers and thus
unavailable to consoles, which were limited to fight games until the release of
Halo on the Xbox in 2001. For most
people, multiplayer digital gunplay is a 2000's thing. Social gaming in the ‘80s
and ‘90s was dominated by fight games.
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| Not every threeway goes according to plan |
So you kick and punch your friends to beat and humiliate
them for hours of joyful play. Most everyone likes that. My brother and I
certainly did, at least a few thousand rounds in International Karate+. We never did fight all that much IRL, at
least in the ‘punch that bastard’ kind of way, or more accurately we stopped
fighting once my little brother got big enough to punch me back. “Just hit him,
he’ll stop,” my Dad always told him when he cried about me bullying him for
toys or the TV remote or just because teenage boys try being assholes before
hopefully figuring out other strategies. And so one day at the age of twelve and
a height over six feet he did punch me back and it hurt so I stopped being a
low-level dickneck bully. Fights became verbal, markers of quick wit with a
touch of emotional abuse, more like the verbal swordplay of the Monkey Island games than anything approaching real violence.
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| the sound effect is pain |
Videogame fighting was a good release for us, and so
we moved on from International Karate
to Palace Software’s amazing Barbarian and
Barbarian II (which uses the two-player combat style for a one-player game), published by Epyx as Death Sword and Axe of Rage respectively in North America, but nobody bought or
pirated those versions because everyone in North America was apeshit Nintendo and
the most widely-pirated software came from European cracking groups. Barbarian was amazing not only because of
the amazingly cheesy mid-80s fantasy cosplay box art (cleaned up for America, of
course), but also because you could decapitate your opponent at any time, bypassing
their health meter. A grumpy lizard would then swear at you before cleaning up
the corpse and kicking the head off-screen. Slick shit. Somehow I could destroy
my brother at this game, which gave me an unfounded confidence betrayed by the
next decade of fighting each other.
With occasional diversions into Thai Boxing (which was amazing because between rounds your trainer would clean up your bloody, broken face like a window washer), Knight Games,
and the brutally hilarious Blood ‘N’ Guts,
my brother and I chopped off each other’s heads well into 1991 before the Street Fighter II arcade machine came
out and everybody lost their collective shit for the next decade of game design
clones. There was a very brief interest in Tongue of the Fatman, largely because of the box art and surreal fighters, but the
game itself was kind of shit. After SF2
every fight game used combo moves, hopefully dozens of them, and allowed for character
selection from a collection of mutant cartoon weirdos and psychopaths. Of
course, as consoles began to totally dominate the digital game market by the late ‘80s
and early ‘90s, computers suddenly weren’t the best place for fighters. Other
than decent SF2 and Mortal Kombat ports, the only decent
fighting game to come out for computer systems in the ‘90s was the excellent manga-inspired
giant robot fighter One Must Fall 2097,
a shareware title which thoroughly outclassed its big-budget corporate competition
by incorporating equipment upgrades and RPG-style skill system elements.
It was with the robots that my fights with my brother ended:
a Tuesday in September 1995, just back from school, and my brother challenged
me in OMF2097 with a new joystick he
picked up. Overconfident from almost a decade of punching my brother’s virtual
face really murdered, distracted from videogames by a bullshit sixteen-month attempt
at being a musician in a string of unheard weirdo bands, I took up his $10 challenge
that he could beat me left-handed with his eyes closed and turned away from the
screen. Of course you can’t win, fucker.
I’ll destroy you in 90 seconds or less you dumb... and I lost without
landing a punch in slightly more than thirty-one seconds. Pay me, bitch! was the last thing I remember before figuring out that in addition to being blind and handicapped my brother was also drunk and realizing suddenly that I actually hate motherfucker fight games.
