International Karate prototypes and evolution into IK+

[@merman1974]

Well, the speech demo was fascinating and the evolution of IK+ is intriguing. Having interviewed Archer a couple of times at live events he always stressed how difficult the timing was to get the third player moving smoothly. As was mentioned in another comment, it is character-based rather than sprites - and you can see that evolution in the prototypes. Seeing the background build up was cool too, with the tree switching sides.

[@alanbenson1505]

Great video, Frank.

[@IvarDaigon]

building the ai demo first is an excelllent strategy as it allows you to run the game continously (over night etc) and check for stability, memory leaks and bugs with very little effort while building out the rest of the game.

[@yungsamus6662]

IK (Atari 800 XL) and IK+ (Amiga 500) are my favorite games of all time. Please save Archer MacLean's legacy Rest in Peace 😢

[@SidneyJamesXBL]

Phenomenal! So interesting! It is auch a shame that we only get to find this all out after Archer has left us. RIP Archer

[@FREEZE64UK]

Fantastic video. Loving the speech demo. I could ask Darrell Etherington about the speech.

[@GamesThatWerent]

Thanks buddy, and yes please if that's ok? Didn't get chance to ask, and would love to learn more about it to update the page :)

[@JakeBirkett]

Great work!

[@marksemczyszyn]

Definitely an iterative thing there. Didn’t Archer say in the past that for IK+ he took the sprite code from the Atari and used that on the 64 because he’d already used all the sprites available in IK. So one fighter was always plotted in software onto the backdrop. A bit like Barbarian I guess.

[@GamesThatWerent]

Yeah, that's right - I think he talks about this in the documentary done by Anthony and Nichola about the approach that he had to take. He was very clever!

[@kodiak64]

That last prototype is probably suffering from "raster stall", that's all. I am guessing he was doing too much inside an interrupt and consequently, the next interrupt that should fire fails to do so because the previous one is still executing code by the time the raster reaches the trigger position for the missed interrupt handler. This is a common thing in game dev... At least in my projects!

[@GamesThatWerent]

Hoping at some point that someone will take a look and try and fix.

[@alanbenson1505]

That was my guess too, Kodiak.

[@commodore64club44]

The Amiga version keeped the hairbands... I always think they look quite goofy and 80s aerobic-ish ...

[@lifeschool]

Really great video! Did you say he hacked the Melbourne house game for the sprites? Apparently there were many cheat codes for IK+, especially the Amiga version. It would be great if someone can reveal some more of those.

[@GamesThatWerent]

Yeah, it looks like the sprites were hacked out and saved onto a work disk. Very likely to see how they fitted together, so he could do similar with his IK. In a video interview, he mentions that he was heavily inspired by the Fist game, but wanted to do something a bit more fast paced.

[@RussDnB]

Am I mis-remembering this. Weren’t the fish used in the Amiga version?

[@GamesThatWerent]

I think they were, but i'm sure they are in the C64 version too. I'll have to double check.

[@firstsurname9893]

​@@GamesThatWerentThe fish and bird graphics are definitely in the 64 retail version, appearing periodically in the background. There is also a worm that crawls across the screen and a spider that drops down from the tree.

[@GamesThatWerent]

Thanks@@firstsurname9893 ! It is good to confirm that they were used.