In 1982, Takashi Nishiyama directed an arcade game called Moon Patrol, for Irem. It featured a moon buggy which moves constantly across a lunar landscape, where you have to jump over holes while shooting out both rocks blocking your path and enemies hovering and attacking overhead. The challenge it presents is one of rhythm and of having to keep track of obstacles along a couple of different planes at once. Moon Patrol was a big success, and among other things was an obvious influence on Ultimate’s Lunar Jetman for the ZX Spectrum, a UK #1 in 1983. Nishiyama’s next game for Irem, though, would be successful and influential on a whole different scale.
As we’ve already seen from The Way of the Exploding Fist and Yie Ar Kung Fu, the Technos game known in English as Karate Champ started off a wave of one-on-one fighting games. Those games combined Karate Champ’s sport-derived concepts with influence from martial arts films, particularly those of Bruce Lee. Takashi Nishiyama was also a fan of martial arts, both practicing them (the interview I read doesn’t specify which exactly) and watching movies. He took the Karate Champ concept in a different direction, simplifying the fighting down much further than that game’s two-point system but having the player take on many opponents across a scrolling level.
His game scrolls in two directions, and makes enough of that to have the levels facing in alternating directions to show it off more. The enemies don’t always approach one at a time or from the same direction, and the results have a bit of Moon Patrol to them, with the rhythm of dealing with attacks from different places coming to the forefront. It’s frenetic and exciting. Each level then ends with a slightly tougher fight with an enemy who takes longer to go down, each armed differently in Yie Ar Kung-Fu style.
Irem released this kung-fu game in 1984 and named it Spartan-X, to tie in with the Japanese name of a new film directed by Sammo Hung and starring Jackie Chan. (The film was originally 快餐車 in Hong Kong, and was Wheels on Meals in English, the phrasing reversed from the standard as the distributors had seen a run of disappointing results with films beginning with the letter M). The film is set in Barcelona, and does feature an ascent up a castle to rescue a woman in a way that broadly tracks the plot of the game. It’s not the most obvious inspiration visually, though; the stairs that you climb up between each level are a match for the ones from a similar scene in the film Game of Death, starring Bruce Lee and released years after his death.
Spartan-X was released internationally in early 1985 with the English title Kung-Fu Master, discarding the movie licence. It would became the inspiration for a whole genre of what would be known as beat-‘em-ups, plenty more of which would be successful. Takashi Nishiyima left Irem for Capcom, following Kenzo Tsujimoto, founder of both companies. At Capcom, Nishiyama went on to direct a game which started from the concept of developing Spartan-X’s boss battles further, moving across into the parallel genre of Yie Ar Kung-Fu and its followers in the process. That 1987 Capcom game was Street Fighter.
Spartan-X was successful enough to get conversions to many different formats, starting with a Famicom/NES version (on the NES it was just titled Kung Fu). Nintendo handled that one themselves. More than that, it features both music and a sinister laughter sample from Koji Kondo, and was directed by Shigeru Miyamoto. It wasn’t Miyamoto’s first Famicom game, but it was an important one. When talking about the inspirations for Super Mario Bros., he has mentioned his time with Spartan-X and particularly its horizontally scrolling levels, though Nintendo took longer to manage to give Mario scrolling in both directions. Nintendo’s Spartan-X also swaps the arcade game’s lilac backgrounds for a sky blue and dark orange colour scheme which is a close match to that of the Super Mario Bros. overworld.
The version of Kung-Fu Master which topped the charts in the UK was the Commodore 64 one. It was programmed by Chris Hawley at Berkeley Softworks. Emphasising the strength of its connection to the arcade original, the cassette version U.S. Gold published here has a photo of the arcade cabinet as part of its artwork. “Kung-Fu Master is a very faithful conversion of its coin-op Daddy” was how Julian Rignall chose to put it in Zzap!64. There was more than a year between the release of that original and the C64 version, and it joined a trend very much in full swing already. Your Computer reviewer D.J. Pepper went as far as to call Kung-Fu Master on the C64 “rather late in the day”.
It’s not as fast as the arcade version, and it reduces the number of enemies, but it keeps the same variety, getting you jumping over tiny enemies and ducking under thrown knives, and maintains the feel of the rhythmic challenge. “Smashing your way through half a dozen [enemies] in quick succession is somehow much more satisfying than the usual prolonged combat against an individual”, said Chris Anderson in Commodore User. He was less impressed by it visually (“The graphics aren’t sensational”) but looked past that to conclude that “I enjoyed Kung-Fu Master a good deal, and that’s despite being a gentle and peace-loving person”. It was a similar story for Gary Liddon back in Zzap!64: “Despite the tacky graphics, Kung Fu Master plays quite well”.
The developer, Berkeley Softworks, was set up by Brian P. Dougherty. While at university in Berkeley, California, he had interned at Atari, and ended up joining Mattel and working on developing their rival Intellivision console. He left and co-founded Imagic, an early but fairly brief third party software success. When Berkeley Softworks started out making games, among those they brought in was Chris Hawley, who had also made Intellivision games before: the self-explanatory Horse Racing and a Space Invaders clone called Space Armada.
As well as Apple II and C64 ports of Kung-Fu Master, Berkeley Softworks produced ports for the same two systems of Karate Champ (the Commodore 64 Karate Champ eventually reached the UK top ten on budget reissue in 1987). After programming Kung-Fu Master, Chris Hawley did not go on to take what he learned and apply it to a game as legendary as Super Mario Bros. or Street Fighter. In fact, as far as I can tell, neither he or Berkeley Softworks in general ever made another computer game.
Instead, Hawley formed part of a team who developed a Commodore 64 graphical operating system called GEOS, attempting to give the C64 something to rival the interface of Apple’s Macintosh. First released in 1986, GEOS was an impressive feat of coding, and gradually built up a following on the Commodore 64 and beyond. Berkeley Softworks changed their name to Geoworks to reflect their main priority. By 1989, they had sold a million copies of GEOS.
“If I were Bill Gates, this is the one product that would cause me to lose sleep” said the editor of industry newsletter Softletter. Gates made an offer to buy GEOS, with Dougherty reporting him as having said “either sell to us or we have to put you out of business”. Dougherty chose not to sell, and Microsoft fairly successfully did their best at the latter option. By 1993, Geoworks had given up on desktop computers and pivoted to PDAs. If things had gone a bit differently with GEOS, perhaps Kung-Fu Master would have become a mere interesting footnote in Chris Hawley’s story in the same way as for Takashi Nishiyama and Shigeru Miyamoto.
Sources:
- The man who created Street Fighter, Matt Leone, 1Up.com, 2011, accessed via Wayback Machine
- Street Fighter 1: An oral history, Matt Leone, Polygon, 2020
- Koji Kondo x Shogo Sakai – Composer Interview, Shmupulations, 2021, translating an interview from Nintendo Dream, 2003
- Shigeru Miyamoto – 2000 Developer Interview, Shmupulations, 2024, translating an interview from Game Maestro, 2000
- [NC US] Super Mario Bros. 25th Anniversary – Interview with Shigeru Miyamoto #2, NintenDaanNC, 2010
- Kung-Fu Master (Irem, 1984), Finnish Retro Game Comparison Blog, 2024
- Zzap! Test: Kung Fu Master, Zzap!64 No. 11, March 1986, accessed via Def Guide to Zzap!64
- Software reviews: Kung Fu Master, D.J. Pepper, Your Computer Vol. 6 No. 4, April 1986, accessed via the Internet Archive
- Screen scene: Kung Fu Master, Chris Anderson, Commodore User No. 30, March 1986, accessed via the Internet Archive
- Profile: Brian Dougherty, Eric Lai, San Francisco Business Times, 2005, accessed via archive.today
- A history of GEOS, James Esch, Retroisle, 2002
- Geoworks ties comeback to PDA, James Daly, Computer World Vol. 27 No. 46, 15 November 1993, accessed via the Internet Archive