Kung-Fu Master (1984)

In 1984, Irem’s Kung-Fu Master (known as Spartan X in Japan), released in North America through Data East, took players on a simple rescue mission which required skilled timing and reflexes. "Mr. X" has captured Sylvia, a pickpocket... a pickpocket!? Yes, a pickpocket. Thomas, a kung-fu master who owns a restaurant, must fight through the five floors of the Devil’s Temple to reach her. In the classic fashion of alternate turns, one or two players control Thomas as he moves, jumps, ducks, punches, kicks, and jump-kicks through waves of Grippers, pixelated weapon-tossing maniacs, falling objects, and a plethora of challenging, or annoying—depending on your point of view—hazards before facing a floor boss. A thrown knife can even be kicked out of the air and sent back toward its owner. The game’s names and rescue premise loosely echo Jackie Chan’s Wheels on Meals, while the five-floor pagoda and succession of martial-arts bosses draw heavily from Bruce Lee’s Game of Death, "WATAH!"

The ambitious creator behind the game is none other than Takashi Nishiyama, who, interestingly enough, had previously worked on Irem’s Moon Patrol—a fantastic but completely different type of game. After leaving Irem for Capcom, Nishiyama directed the original Street Fighter, carrying ideas from Spartan X into a new kind of fighting game. The connection is especially clear in the boss battles, where Kung-Fu Master temporarily becomes a tense one-on-one contest with health bars for both fighters. Even the regular combat is more thoughtful than its frantic pace suggests: punches deal more damage and earn more points, while kicks reach farther. That balance forces players to choose between power and distance, helping give the game a surprisingly deep rhythm beneath its straightforward arcade design. It's noteworthy that, as with Street Fighter, no other Kung-fu style combat game was this refined and easy to control.

Nintendo brought the game home in 1985, first releasing it for the Famicom in Japan as Spartan X and then publishing it in North America for the NES as simply Kung Fu. This was not a completely different interpretation; it preserved the five-floor climb, the major bosses, the punch-and-kick combat, the jumping and ducking, and the alternating two-player mode. Naturally, the NES hardware delivered smaller graphics, fewer on-screen enemies, and a more compact presentation than the arcade cabinet, but the essential challenge remained intact. The controls were also perfectly suited to the NES pad, with one button for punches and another for kicks. This version was directed by Shigeru Miyamoto and developed by Team Nintendo. Interestingly enough, I never had the privilege of seeing this game in the arcade—not because I was too young, but rather because it just wasn't in the lineup of arcades I frequented. However, Kung Fu on NES was actually one of my favorite games, along with Super Mario Bros. and Zelda. It sold 3.5 million copies worldwide and became one of the system’s most memorable early actions games.

The NES version played an important role in Nintendo history. Miyamoto later explained that the technical knowledge gained from working on Excitebike and Kung Fu helped lay the groundwork for Super Mario Bros. "How?" you might ask. The answer is really quite simple: Nintendo had gained valuable experience moving a character through a horizontally scrolling world filled with enemies, obstacles, jumps, and precise timing. The official Famicom follow-up, Spartan X 2, arrived in Japan in 1991, while Irem’s planned arcade sequel, Beyond Kung-Fu, remained a location-tested curiosity until a prototype surfaced decades later. Reports have linked that project to Super Kung-Fu Master, Spartan 2, and ideas eventually reshaped into Vigilante; stories of gray-market kits reaching North American amusement parks remain unconfirmed, but they give Kung-Fu Master an appropriately mysterious final chapter.