After 30 years Amiga can finally play Karateka!

Karateka

Jordan Mechner’s first game for the Apple II, Karateka was a huge success that paves the developer path to a successful career that includes the Prince of Persia franchise. After released for the Apple II, Kareteka was ported to many platforms including Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, Atari 8-bit and ST and many others. But never for the Amiga.

After almost 30 years, the iconic game finally found its way to the Amiga OS, thanks to English Amiga Board forum user meynaf. His Amiga version was directly ported from the Atari ST version in only a few days.

The game was impressive when running on the Apple II due to its animation and some gameplay elements like cut-scenes, which have never been used before. On more advanced platforms like the ST, the game did also pretty well but maybe wasn’t more that innovative as the original version.

Robert Hazelby from Amiga Gamer blog wrote a nice hands-on of the current version for the Amiga:

“The game certainly looks like an early Disney-style animation, and even today, the graphics look really stylish. The limited number of colours used work well and the characters are extremely well animated and well drawn.

I tested this out on my Amiga 1200 (68030 @50mhz), and it ran beautifully. I notice the docs state that this game may run on a 68000, but it will likely need to be an accelerated system to run properly.”

On a side note, Jordan Mechner has published his journals from when he was at university and developed Karateka. Check the book at Amazon’s website.

To read the full review or download the ADF image follow the link below.

Link: EAB Development Thread
Link: ADF Image Download
Link: Binary Download for the Amiga machine
Link: Amiga Gamer Hands-On

Author: Paulo Garcia

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