Kung-Fu Master review: one hallway, five floors, and endless grabbers

Thomas walks into a long temple hallway. Thugs run at him from both ends. Some want to grab him, some throw knives, some are small and quick and leap at his head. At the far end of the floor waits a boss, and above that floor are four more. The gang that kidnapped Sylvia is at the top.

One corridor, two directions

Kung-Fu Master keeps the stage brutally simple: a single corridor, and enemies coming from the left and the right. You get an eight-way joystick and two buttons, one to punch and one to kick. The joystick crouches and also jumps, so every attack can be thrown high, low or in the air.

The small choices matter. Punches score more and hit harder, but they have shorter range. Kicks reach further. So you are always judging distance: let a Gripper get close enough for a punch and he might grab you first.

Grippers, knives and small men

The enemies are few in type and very clear in purpose. Grippers grab Thomas and drain his energy until you shake them off. Knife Throwers throw at two different heights, so you have to read whether to duck or jump. Tom Toms are short and fast and hard to hit standing up. Put them all in one hallway, coming from both ends, and the corridor becomes a rhythm game about turning at the right moment.

Takashi Nishiyama, who had designed Moon Patrol, combined fighting with a shoot 'em up rhythm. Enemies arrive in a steady stream, and your job is to keep the stream from ever reaching you.

Kung-Fu Master is a hallway, two buttons and a clock, and it is enough.

A boss on every floor

The Devil's Temple has five floors, each ending with a boss, and when you reach one the game briefly turns into a one-on-one fight. A fixed time limit hangs over every floor, so you cannot play it safe forever. Those boss fights mattered far beyond this game. Nishiyama later went to Capcom and used them as the basis for Street Fighter.

What it meant back then

In America, Kung-Fu Master arrived through Data East and became the second highest-grossing arcade game of 1985. It was the era of kung fu movies on Saturday television and in the video store, and this machine felt like one of them. The game loosely adapts the Jackie Chan film Wheels on Meals and draws heavily on Bruce Lee's Game of Death, and every kid at the pizza place could tell it was a movie you played.

Most of us never saw the top floor. We saw the hallway, the grabbers, and the first boss, and we came back the next week to get a little further.

Playing it now

Kung-Fu Master holds up because it is so focused. There is no clutter and no wasted motion. Learn to turn early, use kicks to keep grabbers at a distance, and punch only when you are sure. It is the first beat 'em up, and you can feel the whole genre starting to form in that one hallway.