The Way of the Exploding Fist – “10th Dan”

Gregg Barnett was born in Swan Hill, Victoria, Australia. He moved to Melbourne for university and then joined software company Melbourne House in 1982. Up to then, his programming experience had been with the Atari 400. Because the Commodore 64 used a modified version of the same MOS 6502 processor, Melbourne House gave him the task of writing C64 versions of many of the Spectrum games they had been focused on. He did Hungry Horace and Horace Goes Skiing. He also converted their adventure The Hobbit, and eventually a version of its 1984 follow-up Sherlock, released near-simultaneously with the Spectrum one. None of that sounds like obvious preparation for writing a defining fighting game. When I wrote about Horace and the Spiders, though, I talked about the Horace games’ approach to “giving a new spin to a specific arcade game without pretending to be it”. If there was something Barnett learnt for Way of the Exploding Fist, that was surely it.

In 1984, Japanese arcade developer Technos released a game called 空手道. That is Karate or, more literally, Way of the Empty Hand. The game was a karate sim with players in the role of a karateka in white, fighting rounds against a series of single opponents in red. They can move horizontally across the stage, jump, and use a variety of punches and kicks. The moves were all based on a dual joystick control scheme, which gave players a wide range of possibilities at any moment. The game became a big success in Japan and Technos soon followed it up with a version that added a two-player mode. Before the end of the year, Data East published a two-player version outside of Japan, under the name Karate Champ. That became a success too, presumably helped by following so soon after the film The Karate Kid.

Gregg Barnett has been consistent in acknowledging that The Way of the Exploding Fist took some inspiration from Karate Champ, although not quite in the tone of that acknowledgement. In 2002, he claimed to have come up with the idea for a martial arts sim when no such thing was out there, before adding “the coin-op game Karate Champ appeared in the arcades with similar ideas before we had finished Exploding Fist […] it has to said that some of their better ideas were an influence in the end.” Given that he said development for Exploding Fist took four months and Melbourne House released it in June 1985, the implied timelines there look a stretch. Even allowing for the possibility Australia might not have been first on the international release list.

By the time he spoke to FREEZE64 in 2017, Barnett gave a different emphasis. “A virtual prototype soon appeared in the form of Data East’s Karate Champ coin-op. It was hard not to be influenced by that game. There would have been an Exploding Fist without it, but it would probably have looked a bit different to be honest. I certainly remember doing some quality ‘research’ on that coin-op!”. A couple of reviewers at the time picked up on this. L.S. in Commodore User described Way of the Exploding Fist as “inspired by the hit arcade game Karate Champ”, while the writers of new Crash sister magazine Zzap! 64 equated the two even more firmly. “As a Karate Champ fanatic I’ve been waiting for a decent 64 version for a long time. It has arrived”, enthused Julian Rignall.

The Way of the Exploding Fist bears an undeniable similarity to Karate Champ. It is a karate sim with players in the role of a karateka in white, fighting rounds against a series of single opponents in red. They can move horizontally across the stage, jump, and use a variety of punches and kicks. It has the same scoring, the same visible referee, much of the same rhythm. At one point it even has the same bonus game where you get charged by an animal. There is no way of calling that coincidence or a necessity of making a karate game.

Outside of that one feature, The Way of the Exploding Fist is, however, visibly not a game which sees accuracy to Karate Champ as its foremost aim. Replicating the twin-stick control scheme was an obvious impossibility but, rather than approximate it, Barnett came up with a smart set of overlapping but distinct moves, mapped to each of eight joystick directions plus the same directions with the fire button pressed. Not everything is perfect — it takes a bit to get used to pressing up+back to do a forward somersault, and needing to do half a roundhouse kick with back+fire in order to turn around remains goofy — but the controls are mostly remarkably intuitive and rewarding.

Barnett talked about being interested in getting across the physicality of the sport, and Way of the Exploding Fist definitely does so. The sense of weight and presence is strong. When the game’s often strategic, slow fights suddenly burst into action the hit or block feels real and dramatic. The varying move speeds work well, and connecting with some of the trickier moves, like the flying kick, feels even better for how convincingly your opponent collapses afterwards. The illusion is only really broken when the two competitors wind up on top of each other in the same space, punching and kicking outwards ineffectually.

The backdrops they fight in front of give a very different emphasis from Karate Champ’s cheering crowds and TV cameras. Even in the Exploding Fist stage set in a dojo, the only people present are the two fighters and the grey-robed man doing the judging. On other stages they fight outside, mountains and the sea and assorted other scenery behind them. Those stages have some excellent pixel art courtesy of artist Greg Holland, who got the most from the Commodore 64’s pastel colour palette. The simplicity of the plain light yellow for the bit of the screen you fight on works with it particularly well. 

Through those backgrounds, one way Exploding Fist differentiates itself from Karate Champ is in looking far more ostentatiously, stereotypically Japanese. The first stage, the one you’ll spend most time looking at, includes in the background a pagoda, a Fuji-like mountain, a torii, a little red arched bridge, and some trees with cherry blossom. They would have struggled to fit more clichés in if they tried. 

To this, musician Neil Brennan added… a version of “Dance of the Yao People”, a Chinese instrumental drawing on folk tradition. Asked about this choice by Remix64, Brennan said that Melbourne House boss Alfred Milgrom “enjoyed classical music, not just Western, and not only for its beauty and melodic richness, but also because it was out of copyright. That, he loved.” Since Dance of the Yao People was composed by Liu Tieshan and Mao Yuan in 1952, it was the fact it was from China rather than its age that was their protection from having to remove it for copyright reasons like “If I Were a Rich Man” in Jet Set Willy.

At which point I should talk about the game’s name. The cover art to The Way of the Exploding Fist features a grimacing man shattering a plank of wood with his fist. On that wood, in misshapen but legible characters, is written 截拳道, the name of Bruce Lee’s fighting style Jeet Kune Do. The generally used English translation is Way of the Intercepting Fist. “Exploding Fist” sounded more exciting, I guess. Gregg Barnett has talked about being inspired by Bruce Lee films, getting his team to study photo books to replicate Bruce Lee’s moves, and using a scream sampled from Enter the Dragon for the game’s title screen.

The slapdash combination of Japanese and Chinese elements paints a picture of a certain all-purpose Orientalism, and it’s not a pretty one. The impression is not helped by reading a set of contemporary British magazine reviews of Way of the Exploding Fist, an activity which involves being hit repeatedly with casual racism much worse than anything in the game. There are many “ah so”s and “hilarious” L-R swaps. When Commodore User merely refers to “scenes from the orient” “full of the bright colours of the east” it comes as a blessed relief by comparison.

The idea of the worlds of Brue Lee and Japanese martial arts being entirely separate is not one borne out when looking at what was happening in Japan. When Lee’s films had broken through in Japan, leading to a then-record thirty Hong Kong martial arts films being shown there in 1974, people in Japan reportedly referred to this as a boom in karate movies. Japanese companies then started making their own adaptations of those movies. By the mid-’80s, a second wave of Hong Kong action cinema was becoming popular there, with Project A (A計劃), starring Jackie Chan, becoming one of Japan’s top-grossing movies of 1984. The word for karate itself had once been 唐手道 — roughly The Way of the Chinese Hand — before being changed for nationalistic reasons to a homophone which didn’t suggest foreign origins.

In focusing on karate, Karate Champ was an exception to the martial arts trends in Japanese games. A later 1984 arcade game which also set up many genre hallmarks for fighting games was Konami’s Yie Ar Kung-Fu. Elsewhere in Japanese arcades that year, when Irem kickstarted the adjacent genre of side-scrolling beat-‘em-ups, it was literally with a licenced version of another Hong Kong movie starring Jackie Chan. That movie was originally called 快餐車, with the movie and game both called Spartan-X in Japan, and respectively called Wheels on Meals and Kung-Fu Master in English. The game took inspiration from Bruce Lee’s Game of Death as well. I’m not exactly confident that Greg Barnett and Melbourne House had all of that cultural interchange in mind when deciding on The Way of the Exploding Fist, but it’s certainly interesting context. 

While the arcade was becoming a crowded field for martial arts games by the time of The Way of the Exploding Fist, the same was less true when it came to home computers. Datasoft’s Bruce Lee had recently been a big hit, but that was a platformer with just a couple of gestures towards martial arts. Bug-Byte had released Kung Fu, the work of Yugoslavian developers Dusko ‘Duke’ Dimitrijevic and Damir Muraja, and it made #10 in one Spectrum chart in December 1984, but that was a quite basic game. Around the same time, Jordan Mechner had made Karateka for the Apple II, which split the difference between the one-on-one fighter and beat-’em-up approaches. Karateka didn’t stand a chance in the UK until it got a Commodore 64 version, though, and that port only charted in September 1985, months after Way of the Exploding Fist.

In terms of home formats which were popular in the UK, Melbourne House were ahead of trend, and ended up with one of the year’s biggest hits. They quickly followed the Commodore 64 version with ones for the Amstrad CPC (very similar, but with a different selection of backdrops) and ZX Spectrum (not the same game but impressively close in feel) and Exploding Fist topped the UK combined formats chart for a total of 12 weeks. At that year’s Computer & Video Games Golden Joystick awards, it won game of the year, although Gregg Barnett doesn’t seem to have made the journey to the UK to collect the award from Jools Holland.

Many martial arts computer games which followed in the wake of Exploding Fist, from Melbourne House and others, went to #1 in the UK, and so I will be writing about each of them, including versions of both Yie Ar Kung Fu and Kung-Fu Master. One particularly notable game which didn’t quite make it to the top is System 3’s International Karate. Gregg Barnett cited the advance hype for that one as part of his motivation to finish Exploding Fist quicker, but International Karate suffered various delays, including one due to a burglary at System 3’s offices. It eventually made it out on the Spectrum towards the end of 1985, with a superb Commodore 64 port led by Archer MacLean following in Spring 1986.

The C64 version of International Karate owes a particularly clear debt to Exploding Fist, which MacLean called his favourite Commodore 64 game ever, but has even better animation. Befitting its name, International Karate is more international in outlook, and there is some humour in System 3 taking on Melbourne House with a game whose first stage is set in Sydney. It also stuck even more closely to the scoring format of Karate Champ, which became a problem when it went on to be a hit in America. That and the fact that American publishers Epyx released it as World Karate Championship, a name which literally contains “Karate Champ”.

The US branch of Karate Champ publishers Data East took Epyx to court for breach of copyright, and at one point got sales of World Karate Championship suspended. An appeals court eventually ruled that the many similarities still weren’t enough to constitute a breach. That legal episode is probably relevant to Gregg Barnett’s past reluctance to reveal too much direct inspiration from Karate Champ. There is something else to the fact that The Way of the Exploding Fist never faced anything similar, though. He and his colleagues took that inspiration and turned it into a great game that could stand on its own merits.

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Sources:

• From Hungry Horaces to Exploding Fists, Gary Penn, Zzap! 64 No. 18, October 1986
• Interview with Gregg Barnett, Souri, Sumea, 2002, accessed via the Wayback Machine
• Gregg Barnett: Master of C64 games, Vincenzo Mainolfi, FREEZE64 Issue 12, September 2017
• Beam Software: Interview with Gregg Barnett, ACMI, 2006
• Ultimate Guide: The Way of the Exploding Fist, Rory Milne, Retro Gamer No. 243, February 2023
• The History of: Yie Ar Kung-Fu, Martyn Carroll, Retro Gamer No. 194, May 2019
• 8-bit-’em-ups, Retro Gamer No. 22, March 2006
• Sherlock, Mark James Hardisty, The Classic Adventurer No. 08, 2019
• Screen Scene – Way of the Exploding Fist, L.S., Commodore User No. 22, July 1985, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Way of the Exploding Fist, Zzap! 64 No. 4, August 1985
• An Interview with Neil Brennan (Melbourne House/Beam Software), Neil Carr, Remix64, 2020
• The Way of the Exploding Fist (Melbourne House, 1985), Finnish Retro Game Comparison Blog, 2021
• Interactions Between Japanese and Hong Kong Action Cinemas, Kinnia Yau Shuk-Ting, Hong Kong connections: transnational imagination in action cinema, Hong Kong University Press, 2005, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Biggest Japanese box office hits 1984, Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan
• Game 319: Karate Champ, Ahab, Data Driven Gamer, 2022
• Bruce Lee, chart history from Computer Hits
• Kung Fu, chart history from Computer Hits
• Karateka, chart history from Computer Hits
• Golden Joystick Awards, Computer & Video Games No. 55, May 1986, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Merely Mangram, Crash No. 23, December 1985, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• International Karate, chart history from Computer Hits

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