Karateka

Trivia

"Karateka" means a practitioner of karate.

The Akuma Castle that appears at the beginning, seems to be inspired by the ' Himeji Castle ' that really exists in Japan, near Kyoto. Search on Google or Altavista Image Search for 'Himeji Castle' and you'll see tons of great pictures of the real Castle.

The Apple II version of Karateka came on one single-sided floppy disk. However, by booting Karateka up on the opposite side (Side Two) - Karateka would still load, but now the game was upside down. A visual gag on the part of someone at Broderbund most likely.

For the Atari 7800 version of Karateka, the end label on the cartridge was unusual in that it featured square corners instead of the usual rounded corners. This was one of the only (if not the only) games to do so.

This was Jordan Mechner's debut game. He went on to make Prince of Persia afterwards.

Contributed by Macintrash (2535) on Jul 07, 2003.

The game's engine would be later used in Prince of Persia.

'Akuma' the name of the evil warlord in Karateka (and many other games featuring a Japanese bad guy) is a Japanese word that roughly means 'devil'.

It is possible to fall off the edge of the cliff in the first scene if you back into it.

Most of Karateka on the PC is made of editable text files. You can modify the game by changing the coordinates in the language files.

Contributed by Trixter (8865) on Apr 03, 2000.