Whatever else goes for Way of the Tiger, playing it via emulator has brought back an integral part of my childhood gaming experience. It comes on different cassettes for different modes, such that you get to the initial menu screen, select what you want to play, and then get asked to insert the relevant tape. But I kept doing that and then getting stuck on a loading screen, which was a comfortingly familiar experience. The moment of seeing a game’s menu screen often used to be thrilling, because it often took several attempts, a bit of screwdriver-on-cassette-deck action, and a ten minute wait to get to that point. Each attempt to play a game was contingent on it making it through the fraught loading process. Some games never did, and my imagined versions of them built from screenshots and descriptions remained enticing in potentia forever.
After a successful workaround with the tapehead screwdriver’s web equivalent, Way of the Tiger’s positioning becomes clear. The biggest trends of the previous year were 3D games and martial arts games. The next step is obvious to be point of it being inevitable that someone would do it – combine the two! Take part in a series of one-on-one fights, but in 3D!
The isometric 3D look that broke through in 1985 would increase the complexity of a fight exponentially, and be difficult to do besides, and it isn’t the route Gremlin Graphics went for. Instead, they produced 3D effects via things in the background landscape moving at different speeds when you move left to right or jump up, together with a turning animation for the characters. The effects result in both something visibly new and different, and a game which is super janky looking. Way of the Tiger is bulky and slow and the action is in near-monochrome, presumably to allow for the effects, and it’s one of those things that it’s hard to imagine from present historic distance as being worth the sacrifice.
There are three modes, but the first, unarmed combat, is significantly longer than pole and sword combat put together, suggesting that they are afterthoughts to add a bit more variety. The main draw is the one in which your covered-up ninja walks around and kicks and punches a succession of opponents. When you hit one enough times that they fall down, the next pops up somewhere. The fighting is clumsy and weightless and there is no real reason to have you walk around instead of having it as a series of fixed one screen battles, apart from to show off the 3D effects. The cost of doing so is that it loses any of the sense of occasion for each contest that Way of the Exploding Fist or Yie Ar Kung Fu did. Way of the Tiger has some ideas that align with the roving beat-’em-up genre being invented in Japanese arcades contemporaneously, but it doesn’t actually gain any of its advantages – none of the thrill of dealing with crowds of opponents at once here.
The high concept obviously did its job of creating a game that would sell, and we’re going to see plenty of cases in future where games succeed in making a combination add up to more of the sum of its parts. In this case, though, they add up to less. It would have been better off if that tape had never loaded.
