The action-forward encounters made Kung Fu Master feel like a fighting game - even though fighting games didn’t really exist yet. More importantly, each staircase is guarded by a powerful opponent with their own unique martial arts style. They are very small sneekyweezelgaming via Polygon But unlike the movie, Kung Fu Master also features dangerous butterflies, and, uh, child warriors. Just like in Game of Death, the hero of Kung Fu Master fights his way up a five-story pagoda. It’s pretty much Game of Death: The Game. A few years after Game of Death, designer Takashi Nishiyama began working on Kung Fu Master, a game inspired by Bruce’s final film.
It didn’t take long for his influence on games to become obvious. Game of Game of Deathīruce’s films arrived during the infancy of Japan’s modern game industry - just a few years before the breakout success of Taito’s Space Invaders. The tower structure of Game of Death made the hero’s ascent completely literal, and established a formula for no-nonsense action storytelling that’s reappeared in some really good films, and even a Spongebob episode. “As far as I can tell, that had not been done before.” “There’s a fight structure that’s narrative and has a trajectory, where there are levels to each section of this fight sequence,” says Curtis Tsui, producer of Criterion Collection’s recent Bruce Lee: His Greatest Hits box set. In Game of Death’s final set piece, there is something important at the top of a five-story pagoda, and Lee’s character has to battle his way up, floor by floor, engaging in one-on-one fights with increasingly difficult opponents. It only used 11 minutes of the footage Lee had shot back in 1972, but that 11 minutes made a huge impression.
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Patched together from old film clips, body doubles, and even paper cutouts Lee’s face, the movie was a mess. In 1978 Game of Death, the film Lee had set aside to shoot Enter the Dragon, came out in Japan. While Lee’s filmography set the tone for most martial arts media of the era, one film in particular would inspire Street Fighter’s predecessor. “They didn’t seem to mind it and it didn’t affect his heroic status in Japan If anything, Bruce Lee is bigger in Japan than he is in the west.” “He was so famous that they even released Fist of Fury, which is very anti-Japanese,” Bruce Lee biographer Matthew Polly told Polygon. The success prompted distributors to go back and release his other movies. The Kung Fu craze swept through pop music, cartoons, comics, magazines, and eventually, games.Įnter the Dragon was also the first Bruce Lee movie to receive a release in Japan - and it was a huge hit. But Bruce Lee was still a phenomenon, and the explosive popularity of Enter The Dragon lifted martial arts to a new level of mainstream acceptance. Just a month before the release of Enter the Dragon, Bruce suddenly and mysteriously passed away. Overnight, Bruce became a worldwide star. In North America, Enter the Dragon made $25 million on a reported $850,000 budget. Bruce’s leading man swagger was infectious. But the fights weren’t the only attraction.
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The action was faster and more violent than the watered-down portrayals of Eastern martial arts in spy movies and whitewashed TV shows. If that sounds like something you’ve watched or played, it’s probably because it was inspired by Enter the Dragon.Ĭhina’s film industry had been producing Kung Fu and Wuxia films for decades, but international audiences had never seen hand-to-hand combat like this on screen. Enter … Enter the DragonĪllow me to describe the plot of Enter the Dragon to you, a gamer: An eccentric underworld mastermind invites fighters of varying nationalities and styles to his secret island compound, where they battle one another in deadly, unsanctioned matchups, until only the most powerful warrior remains. Lee is writing and directing a new movie, Game of Death, but in the middle of the shoot Warner Brothers offers him the opportunity to star in his first international feature. He’s done supporting roles on American TV, but he still hasn’t broken through to international audiences. But nobody outside of the Hong Kong market has seen them. The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, and Way of the Dragon are all in the can. By this point, he’s spent his life traveling between California and Hong Kong, working as a martial arts instructor and an actor.
The video game industry is making moves, and the first home consoles hit the market.