When it comes to books, I’m always searching for something I cannot quite put into words. I know this isn’t useful. Let’s have a go at getting to this. I’m after something that is absolutely a book and also more than a book, something that tells a story but also opens that story out in surprising ways, taking different forms, trying different things.
The Making of KaratekaPublisher: Digital EclipseDeveloper: Digital EclipsePlatform: Played on XboxAvailability: Out now on PC, Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox X/S.
I have caught glimpses of this book-non-book over the years. Maddening glimpses. There’s something of it in The Spy’s Guidebook, which is an overview of codes and kids’ espionage stuff and also, in a way, the design document for a million summer holidays. There’s something of it in Choose Your Own Adventures, not the choices so much, but the text working with those evocative pen-and-ink drawings, all turtlenecks and loon pants, suggesting some huge multi-book 1970s world-building project. Something of it too in all the cook books I’ve bought over the years despite not being a brilliant cook. They offer recipes, but also a way, as Fergus Henderson once put it, of being in the world. That’s close.
Maybe you understand this desire, poorly articulated, for a book that resists the confines of its own covers, that seems eager to shrug off various forms at will and blend readability and writeability (a word, I have just discovered, that Google Docs is eager to transform into “readability”, which feels like some kind of philosophical prank). If so, I reckon you will love The Making of Karateka, which has just come out. I should add: there are plenty of other reasons to love this brilliant piece of software, but the book-non-book was my way in, and I reckon there are worse ways to get started here.
The Making of Karateka is the latest from Digital Eclipse, who recently made the brilliant Atari 50 collection, which was a celebration of games as well as a dizzying museum of their creation, a museum which seemed to unfold in every direction like a paper castle springing from the pages of a pop-up book. I love Atari 50, but I think The Making of Karateka is even better, because it tells a single story. You travel a long distance with a couple of the characters. It’s gently novelistic.