14 DAY TRIAL // Jordan Mechner, best known for designing the original Prince of Persia game, has revealed in an interview that a followup to his first video game for the Apple II computer, Karateka, is under development.
"There actually is a plan to bring back Karateka," the renowned video game designer told gaming site Gamasutra. "It's a project I'm going to be involved in. I can safely say it's not going to be in the way you expect," he added. Not much more information about the Karateka followup was revealed during the interview. However, Mechner did share with the fans how he and one of the game's programmers managed to pull off one of the strangest Easter Eggs the video game market had ever seen.
"The programmer doing copy protection for the game figured out that by messing with the bit table, the whole game could be played upside down, which is really hard to do," he explained. "We thought it would be hilarious if we burned the flipped version of the game to the other side of the disk." Naturally, it would take a different method of writing the game to the floppy disk to achieve this, but, ultimately, the idea was accepted by those involved in the production of the game, as Mechner revealed.
"We figured of all the people who buy the game, a couple of them would accidentally put the floppy in upside down," he told interviewers. "That way, when that person calls tech support, that tech support rep would once in blue moon have the sublime joy of saying, 'Well sir, you put the disk in upside down,' and that person would think for the rest of their life that's how software works." According to the designer, publisher Broderbund was receptive to the idea: "We went to the president of Broderbund to propose this, and we didn't think they'd go for it, because it would require an assembly line change to actually burn the game onto both sides of the disk, which adds however many cents. So we went in, and he said, 'Sure. Do it.'"
Gameplay footage from the original Karateka game is available for your viewing pleasure below.