Ocean’s contract with Konami to port their arcade games under the Imagine label had quickly worked well with Hyper Sports. Even if it did end up competing with Ocean’s own Daley Thompson’s Decathlon sequel. Hyper Sports was just one of eight games that formed part of the agreement, though, and the most successful of all was the one that Imagine released at the start of 1986. By the time the two parties reached agreement around the middle of 1985, Konami had already released Yie Ar Kung-Fu in arcades, including internationally, and on the MSX computer and Famicom console. Ocean may have seen it as the biggest prize on offer. 

Even if they didn’t, the immense success of Melbourne House’s The Way of the Exploding Fist would quickly have alerted them to the extent of the opportunity. That became the UK’s bestselling game of 1985 and fighting games and martial arts were the in thing. As it turned out, the first three new #1 games of 1986 all fell into at least one of those categories. Yie Ar Kung-Fu, though, was the only one of the three to be both. And rather than just being a rehash of Exploding Fist with some tweaks, like International Karate, Yie Ar Kung-Fu was a big step forward for the genre whose future it had a big part in carving out the future of.

The Way of the Exploding Fist drew heavily on the Technos arcade game 空手道, known in English as Karate Champ. Yie Ar Kung-Fu was one of a wave of games which followed that one into arcades. The lack of individual credits means that I have been unable to find any details on who actually made it within Konami, beyond some unsourced suggestions which still only go as far as specifying a division. I’m not going to be able to draw on details of its creation and inspirations. So it is just a case of observing the similarities and differences.

  • 対戦空手道 / Karate Champ (Technos, 1984, Arcade)
  • 対戦空手道 / Karate Champ (Technos, 1984, Arcade)
  • The Way of the Exploding Fist (Melbourne House, 1985, Commodore 64)
  • The Way of the Exploding Fist (Melbourne House, 1985, Commodore 64)

As with Karate Champ, two competitors move left and right across the width of a single screen, trying to inflict blows on each other. They have to reach a particular number of successful strikes to win the match. After you successfully punch and kick your way to a victory, you progress to face a different opponent. At some point in that progression, the backdrop to the fights changes. The differences are in the details, but they’re ones which have a big effect.

First of all, the points. You have to reach a much larger number of them. More importantly, though, the action does not stop and reset when a hit is successfully landed. You can go right ahead and punch them again immediately. The combined result is that the cagey, high stakes jostling of Karate Champ (and later Way of the Exploding Fist) is set aside for something that can ebb and flow without pause. The points are visually displayed for each competitor as a red bar below a line with notches on it. The bar decreases by a notch with each hit. In between the two bars is the destination which they can reach: the letters KO. It’s not quite the final form of the fighting game health bar, but it’s most of the way there.

  • Yie Ar Kung-Fu (Konami, 1984/1985, Arcade)
  • Yie Ar Kung-Fu (Konami, 1984/1985, Arcade)

Then there are the competitors you play as and fight. Karate Champ was a competition between two evenly matched men (indeed, identical except for the colour they wore) with athletic but realistic abilities. The difference in Yie Ar Kung-Fu is clear the first time you press up and your character Oolong leaps to several times his height. The game has no interest in representing a real sporting competition; proceedings don’t take a lead from kung fu as something practiced in reality, but as something practiced in over-the-top movies. The MSX version even renamed the main character from Oolong to Lee, making the inspiration from Bruce Lee even more obvious.

As part of the change away from sport, the competition is now an asymmetrical one. You fight against a series of cartoonishly distinct characters with very different abilities. By the second stage you are fighting a woman armed with throwing stars, while you have no such tools at your disposal. You’re not just dealing with a series of opponents each steadily using the same moveset more proficiently, but reacting to a new set of moves (and weapons) each time. The challenge and experience is very different, with a massive emphasis on increased spectacle. Who needs tight technical fighting when you have one fighter taking a giant bound over another one corkscrewing through the air perpendicular to the ground.

  • Yie Ar Kung-Fu (Konami, 1984/1985, Arcade)
  • Yie Ar Kung-Fu (Konami, 1984/1985, Arcade)

Ocean had a lot else going on beyond the already extensive deal with Konami, and they weren’t expanding their own staff anything like fast enough to make all of the games they planned to release. Especially when they wanted something as potentially popular as Yie Ar Kung-Fu to come out on as many of the popular home computer formats as possible. As a result, they ended up giving a contract to make the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC versions to Brian Beuken in Scotland. His previous development experience was making some small-scale CPC games he sold through local shops and through adverts in Computer & Video Games magazine. That seems an odd choice for Ocean, but he was apparently persuasive when he met with them.

  • Rollaball (Timeslip, 1984, Amstrad CPC)
  • Rollaball (Timeslip, 1984, Amstrad CPC)

Beuken worked on all three, renting a Yie Ar Kung-Fu arcade machine to play repeatedly and take videos of to help design the graphics for each conversion. For most of the programming work, though, he subcontracted further, putting out more adverts in local newspapers. I haven’t been able to find details of the Spectrum and C64 programmers, but for the CPC version he signed up Keith Wilson, who was 14 at the time. Wilson told the magazine Amstrad Action in late 1986 that “one of my great programming secrets is to drink lots and lots of tea”. No word on whether the tea was Oolong.

Despite some struggles with memory limitations, Beuken and his subcontractors managed to get the Amstrad and Spectrum versions finished in time to be released right before Christmas 1985, each quite different but providing something of the correct spectacle. The CPC version’s big colourful sprites are especially impressive, while the Spectrum one has an interesting solution to the problem of Spectrum joysticks only having one button compared to the arcade machine’s two. It has the player press the space bar to switch between punches and kicks, which is rather a faff, but a nice way of keeping the extended moveset. 

  • Yie Ar Kung-Fu (Imagine, 1985, ZX Spectrum)
  • Yie Ar Kung-Fu (Imagine, 1985, ZX Spectrum)
  • Yie Ar Kung-Fu (Imagine, 1985, Amstrad CPC)
  • Yie Ar Kung-Fu (Imagine, 1985, Amstrad CPC)

Clare Edgeley in Sinclair User, reviewing the Spectrum version, said that “the graphics are colourful and well-drawn, and the animation is fluid”. Alison Hjul of Your Sinclair said that it “has the edge over its opponents if you’re looking for variety” and that its action “lies somewhere between circus acrobatics and a Glasgow brawl”. Likewise Amstrad Action said that “what makes the game so entertaining despite the recent rash of bash-’em-ups is the variety of foes” and awarded the game its “Mastergame” status.

While Brian Beuken’s subcontracted Amstrad and Spectrum two versions worked out, the Commodore 64 version was another matter. His programmer struggled to make the sprites work, and because the C64 used the 6510 processor rather than the Z80 of the other two computers, it was presumably more difficult for Beuken to help out with his CPC experience. He was not able to send cassettes showing good progress to Ocean like he was with the others, and eventually they took it out of his hands, getting David Collier to make it in-house. Since Collier was already one of the duo of programmers making Rambo: First Blood Part II, this was far from ideal. The Commodore 64 version ended up slipping past Christmas and into January 1986.

Commodore User reviewer Mike Pattenden described Collier as having “knocked the game off in a couple of months” but said that it looked “as if it’s had a year’s care and attention lavished on it”. He also talked up the speed of the game, testing it as being quicker than the arcade machine. Not everyone was as positive, with Zzap!64 calling the sprites “small and puny”, and there is something decidedly odd about the C64 version. 

  • Yie Ar Kung-Fu (Imagine, 1986, Commodore 64)
  • Yie Ar Kung-Fu (Imagine, 1986, Commodore 64)
  • Yie Ar Kung-Fu (Imagine, 1986, Commodore 64)

The game steps in to give you a lot more help in controlling your fighter than the other versions (and than other fighting games of the time), changing direction for you to follow your opponent as needed. The result is that you can win through quite a few rounds simply by holding down the button plus a direction to high kick again and again, automatically following the opponent around. Elsewhere in the Zzap!64 review, Gary Penn took the unusual step of saying that “the Amstrad version is superior without a doubt”.

Whatever the merits of the different versions, they were good enough to succeed. Once the Commodore 64 version came out in January 1986, Yie Ar Kung-Fu went to #1 in the UK charts, before returning there for another two weeks in February. It went on to be the UK’s bestselling computer game of 1986. Ocean started negotiations for offering Brian Beuken a job but it didn’t work out (“I think I over-priced myself on salary”). Tea-drinking teenager Keith Wilson went on to work on another successful Imagine game which I will be talking about later in 1986. And games building on the foundations laid down by the arcade Yie Ar Kung-Fu continued to be a fixture near the top of the charts for a long time to come.

  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 18 January 1986, Popular Computing Weekly
  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 15 February 1986, Popular Computing Weekly
  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 22 February 1986, Popular Computing Weekly

Sources: