Fist II: The Legend Continues – “Meditation may strengthen mind and body”

One-on-one martial arts fighting game The Way of the Exploding Fist was the UK’s best selling game of 1985, and throughout my journey through 1986, its trendsetting status has been obvious. Yie Ar Kung-Fu, Kung-Fu Master and The Way of the Tiger all followed it to the top of the UK charts. When Commodore User’s review of Exploding Fist‘s sequel said that “A whole heap of clones followed the release of the Melbourne House original last year” they were likely thinking of those plus International Karate, a game that couldn’t have been much more similar to The Way of the Exploding Fist. International Karate proved quite a success too, even going on to hit #1 in computer game charts in the USA in late 1986 (under the name World Karate Championship, published by Epyx).

Exploding Fist lead designer Gregg Barnett and Melbourne House initially sidestepped this newly crowded martial arts landscape by making Rock’n Wrestle, an ambitious but overly complex 3D wrestling game. After that, though, they returned to their biggest success. Musing to Retro Gamer on what happened next, Barnett noted that “it would have been easy to just reskin the original game (although we didn’t have that term in those days), change locations and dojos, add new opponents”. But, as he told Freeze 64, “as I really liked exploration games, I decided to combine the two genres. I really wanted to do something that I would love to play if it was out there”. The result was Fist II: The Legend Continues.

Barnett remembered a development process for Fist II which took a bit longer than the four months for the original game, not due to any particular challenges but just due to making something more complex. He was joined by a slightly enlarged version of the original team, with Greg Holland and Russell Comte on art, Neil Brennan on music, and programming assistance from Nigel Spencer, Trevor Nuridin and Bruce Bailey. They turned the game, as Barnett wanted, into something with a heavy exploration element and a sprawling world to move around in. It still has fighting bouts as well, that play much like the original, but with state-of-the-art health bars, your health regenerating slowly as you explore.

Of the rival games other companies had come up with, Fist II most closely resembles Gremlin Graphics’s The Way of the Tiger. The story set out in the Fist II manual, putting you as a descendent of a “Fist Master” and out to take down an “evil Warlord” in his volcano fortress, even has a very similar line in Orientalist fantasy to the books The Way of Tiger was adapting. Rather than just walking from side to side and taking in the background scenery, though, Fist II makes its exploration elements into a bigger part of gameplay.

There are different environments, lots of ladders and trapdoors to add vertical exploration, and shortcuts to take as you go back and forward over the same settings. Working out that you can kick down a closed door is a very satisfying early moment. Beyond that, there are scrolls to find and take to temples, and doing so gives you a boost to your powers, in the form of an extra life and in some cases powers which help your exploration, like immunity to poison.

“I haven’t played Metroid or Castlevania to this day” said Barnett when reflecting on this gameplay approach in the 2019 Retro Gamer interview. “From an existing game perspective the only influence was the feeling of exploration I got from the Ultima games.” He also listed that influential American RPG series as among the games he liked best in a ZZap! 64 interview ahead of Fist II’s release, in which he described Fist II as “more of a role playing game with karate combat”. “It’s not just another karate game, there’s a lot more to it”. 

Fist II throws you straight into the game and lets you figure out where to go for yourself, with the instructions not providing too much immediate direction. There is a score display, with your current score and all time top score, but other than that, health bars and keeping track of any scrolls you’ve collected, that’s about it. Even when you die it just chucks you straight back to the beginning with nary a message in between (something Gary Penn in Zzap! 64 called “very shoddy and unprofessional”). 

It is also a little weird to see how it keeps the same movement from Exploding Fist and carries it across to the new design. There are new animations for walking and for jumping up and climbing ladders, as well as for more specialist things like meditation, but if you want to jump over a trapdoor, you do so with the same diagonal up-back control and somersault animation as you would in a fight. That slight jankiness is exceeded whenever you walk to the edge of the screen and your character gets stuck in a loop while the screen moves.

As compensation for the lack of slickness, Fist II offers up not just scale but a lot of atmosphere. The caverns where your character moves behind foreground rocks are very effective at giving a feeling of the walls closing in. Neil Brennan’s music does a lot with very little, getting enjoyably eerie. As a game, it relies on players appreciating that enough to stick with what can be a very slow-burn experience. 

You won’t get to experience much of it unless you’re good enough at fighting, something Beam did come up with an answer for. As Barnett explained to Zzap! 64, “we’ll be giving away an enhanced version of Fist I on the flipside”. And indeed, the cassette is labelled “Combat practice program on reverse side”. They made the hypothetical reskin sequel after all, not as the game but just as an added bonus. As good value as you could argue that was, Fist II only sold well enough to spend one week at the top of the UK chart, compared to the months for its predecessor. Fist II also sold fewer copies during 1986 than the original The Way of the Exploding Fist did.

Fist II: The Legend Continues got one of the wider spreads of critical response that I have seen. Your Commodore’s review said that “The idea of a quest rather than just straight combat works very well indeed” and could only fault the scrolling. Ken McMahon in Commodore User wrote that “As surely as Way of the Exploding Fist was The martial arts game of 1985, Fist II is set to take its place as the definitive Kung Fu classic for this year”. On the other hand, in Zzap! 64 Julian Rignall complained that “the program looks unfinished and is completely overpriced” and Gary Penn called it “basically a big disappointment”.

Others sat between those extremes. Computer & Video Games started their review by saying they were initially “profoundly disappointed” and queues of people waiting to see it quickly dissipated. They remained unhappy with the fighting, but ended up seeing “a slower, more thoughtful game with a lot more to it than meets the eye”, and that they planned to stick with. Francis Jago in Your Computer took a wider perspective. “Overall, Fist II is a good game […] One thing Fist II cannot do, however, is expect to create the impact of the original”. That seems to have been a very fair assessment. His closing point, however, would not age so well: “fighting is a tiring genre and this game reflects that.”

At the same time as Fist II was in development, Archer Maclean, who was inspired by his love for The Way of the Exploding Fist when making International Karate, had a conversation with Activision where they asked if he could take fighting games to the next level. As he explained to Retro Gamer in 2006, he was thinking about how to implement a multi-player dojo setup where he “wanted the next player to get up and walk into the fighting area as the other went and sat down”. From there he realised that he could instead make a game where three fighters fought it out at once. “As soon as I had this idea I knew it was a good one”. He rushed to make it, acutely aware of how easily someone else could come up with the same idea. 

The resultant game came out in late 1987 as International Karate +, or IK+ for short. Activision published it in the US as Chop ’n’ Drop. Maclean managed to give its animation an impressive fluidity, basing attacks on moves he traced from movies, and then working out ways to transition from one attack straight into another. In his hands, the third fighter turned out to be a brilliant idea, adding a thrilling level of unpredictable chaos to what had already been a very action-packed game. 

IK+ was not as immediately successful as Fist II. There is no record of it making the UK charts in 1987 at all, although this has to be seen in the context of that year’s available records being particularly patchy. IK+ gained a reputation as a classic through, and it hit #3 in the C64 chart and #7 on the combined chart in 1990, on a budget rerelease. When Zzap! 64 successor Commodore Force debuted, its January 1993 issue had a feature rounding up C64 fighting games and writer James Price gave the highest rating, 95%, to IK+. This compared to 91% for The Way of the Exploding Fist and 71% for Fist II.

That feature didn’t give a score or write-up to International Karate, with Price explaining that “as Exploding Fist and the original International Karate are almost identical I thought it pointless to include them both”. One game that it didn’t even give that much acknowledgement to was the third Exploding Fist game, released towards the end of 1988. Returning to the single location fights of the original, it had one new addition: a third fighter. The extra fighter wore green rather than blue, but the IK+ inspiration would have been obvious even without the game’s title, Exploding Fist+. The two series had swapped places, with Exploding Fist reduced from trendsetter to follower. Exploding Fist+ was not a success.

Exploding Fist+ was also not released by Melbourne House, but by Firebird. In early 1987, Melbourne House’s owners separated out its development department, Beam Software, and sold the remaining UK publishing elements and the Melbourne House name to budget software pioneers Mastertronic. The price was reportedly more than £1 million. This is not my last time writing about a UK #1 game with Melbourne House in its credits, or Beam Software, or Gregg Barnett. However, I will meet each of the three separately rather than together. Just years after kickstarting whole genres with The Hobbit and The Way of the Exploding Fist, Melbourne House in its established form was over.

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Sources:

• From Hungry Horaces to Exploding Fists, Gary Penn, Zzap! 64 No. 18, October 1986
• Gregg Barnett: Master of C64 games, Vincenzo Mainolfi, FREEZE64 Issue 12, September 2017
• Interview with Gregg Barnett, Souri, Sumea, 2002, accessed via the Wayback Machine
• Beam Software: Interview with Gregg Barnett, ACMI, 2006
• The Making of Fist II: The Legend Continues, Alexander Chatzhoannou, Retro Gamer No. 201, January 2020
• Yie Ar tops charts for 1986, Popular Computing Weekly Vol. 6 No. 7, 12-18 February 1987, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• The Making of… International Karate and IK+, Retro Gamer No. 26, June 2006
• Zzap! Test – Fist II, Zzap! 64 No. 20, December 1986, accessed via Def Guide to… Zzap! 64 
• Reviews – Fist II, G.R.H., Your Commodore No. 28, January 1987, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Screen Scene – Fist II: The Legend Continues, Ken McMahon, Commodore User No. 38, November 1986, accessed via Amiga Magazine Rack
• Reviews – Fist II, Computer & Video Games No. 62, December 1986, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Software Shortlist – Fist II, Francis Jago, Your Computer Vol. 6 No. 12, accessed via the Internet Archive 
• IK+, chart history at Computer Hits
• You Lookin’ for a Fight, Mate?, James Price, Commodore Force No. 1, January 1993, accessed via Def Guide to… Zzap! 64
• Mastertronic buys Melbourne House, Popular Computing Weekly Vol. 6 No. 7, 12-18 February 1987, accessed via Spectrum Computing

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