International Karate is a pretty cool karate game for Commodore 64 (and some other platforms).

Released in 1986 by System 3, the great masters of all games having something to do with martial arts (See Last Ninja series for even more cool stuff!).

The game featured beautiful places from all around the world to fight in - very nice scenes from places like Giza, Sydney, New York (Japan is naturally there too, of course)... The idea was simple: Fight, and try to get 2 full points before the other. In the "bonus games" you can try to break a huge bunch of bricks. (No, not with your hands. With your head. That's how the really tough guys do that.)

The C64 version was coded by Archer Maclean, graphics made by Mark Cale. The music - a really good oriental piece of over 10 minutes - was made by the grand maestro Rob Hubbard. The song was notably inspired by Ryuichi Sakamoto's score for movie "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence". (There are numerous more or less faithful remixes of the song. One of my favorites is Jeroen Breebart's "80s mix", complete with horrible synthetizers =)

Of the two karate games I've ever played with my C64 (The Way of the Exploding Fist being the other), this one was probably easier to master at first and thus much more fun. Also, the music in this game is just perfect. WotEF had better sound effects, though. (Samples! Cooool! =)

The only unfair thing was that on the same floppy came Atari version - and they had put that to side A. Bah!

Followed up by IK+, which I haven't seen. (There's a constant quabble among some people which of the two is better...)

Thanks to thisfred for reminding me about Hubbard's influences, and STIL for the actual information...