Before fighting games became big business, there was a title that tried to approximate real karate with unexpected seriousness. Karate Champ by the Technos Japan studio is one of the oldest fighting games of all, and it arrived on the NES as one of the ancestors of a genre that would later dominate arcades around the world.
What set Karate Champ apart from later fighting games was its emphasis on technique rather than flashy special moves. The game simulated karate matches in the spirit of the actual sport: for a cleanly executed punch, kick, or block the referee awarded points, and whoever was first to earn a full point won the round. This scoring structure, in which precision and timing of a strike decide the outcome, gave the game an air of authentic martial art. The arcade original famously used a pair of joysticks to allow a wide palette of movements and stances.
Technos Japan, the studio that later became famous for series like Double Dragon and Kunio-kun, laid down important foundations here. Karate Champ showed that one-on-one combat could be the full-fledged substance of a game, and it inspired an entire generation of creators. It is no coincidence that it was precisely in the mid-1980s, when the game appeared, that the fighting game genre began to gather momentum.
Culturally, the game drew on the era's fascination with martial arts, sparked worldwide by films with Eastern heroes and by the sport of karate itself. Karate Champ became one of the titles that translated this interest into interactive form and showed players that a virtual dojo could be just as thrilling as the silver screen.
Today Karate Champ is above all a historical curiosity and study material for anyone interested in the roots of fighting games. Its controls may seem quirky to modern players, but they conceal a piece of gaming history on which a billion-dollar genre, as we know it today, was built.
Why play: One of the oldest ancestors of the fighting game, with a sportily conceived scoring system rewarding technique, it is ideal for every lover of gaming history and the roots of the genre.
Game 75 of 120 for Nintendo NES
