|  The Way Of The Exploding Fist | |
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| | Releases | | Name | Released By | Release Date | Distribution | Product Code | Retail Price | Format | Package | Rarity | Notes | Owned |
| Melbourne House release | Melbourne House | 1986 | Commercial | MH416 | £6.99 | Cassette | Double box | Unspecified | | 3 |
| Ricochet re-release | Ricochet | 1988 | Commercial | RC2018 | £1.99 | Cassette | Single case | Unspecified | | 6 |
| 2 found. |
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| | Covers | 
Cassette Cover (Front) |
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Cassette Cover Front 2 |
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Cassette Cover Back 1 |
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Cassette Cover Back 2 |
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| | Physical Media | 
Cassette (Australian) |
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Cassette (Richocet, Black) |
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Cassette (Richocet, White) |
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| | Author Interviewed | Richard Costello was interviewed in Retro Gamer 243 (pp. 40-41, February 2023) specifically about his C16 port of The Way Of The Exploding Fist. This is a plain text transcription of that interview, but the original magazine (digital/printed) at Magazine Direct.
[RG]: How did you end up converting Exploding Fist to the C16?
[RC]: I knew this lad through a friend of mine who had got a job working with a new company in Birmingham doing computer games. It was run by a guy who we called Lurch – because he looked like the butler out of The Addams Family! He had signed up all of these deals, and one of them was Exploding Fist on the C16. He asked if I was interested in doing that, and I said yeah. So he gave me a C16 to work on, and I took it home. I developed the conversion in my spare time, while I was working at Loughborough University writing educational software.
[RG]: How did you go about converting the game?
[RC]: I coded it on a BBC Micro, and the reason for that was that it had an assembler. It also had a proper keyboard, a disk drive and was generally faster. So I wrote the code on that, and then ported it over to the C16. But I didn’t have an interface between the BBC and the C16, so I couldn’t just fire it over. I had to assemble it, generate the hex, and then leave the printouts for my mum to type in. She’s 96 now and doesn’t remember helping, but I keep telling her that she’s the world’s oldest computer-games programmer!
[RG]: How much leeway were you given?
[RC]: I just had to make it look similar enough to the original that the same name could be put on it. I would have had the BBC version, and I would have tried to make the C16 version like that. So the C16 Exploding Fist was visually and in terms of playability a port of the BBC version. I remember being quite impressed with what the artist managed to do given that he only had monochrome to work with.
[RG]: What sorts of challenges did you have?
[RC: ]We made the sprites smaller because of the way the C16’s screen worked. We ended up not being able to do certain moves, and there were less frames of animation for each of the ones we did have. Later on, Lurch went bankrupt, but then someone from Melbourne House rang me. They said they knew I was writing the C16 Exploding Fist, and that when it was finished to come and see them. They loved it, and asked if I would I take £2,000 for it. So I said yes. I remember I bought a Kawasaki GZ600 with the money!
[RG]: Did Exploding Fist lead to you converting various other fighting games?
[RC]: No, that was totally coincidental. I did Fist, and then got a job at Gremlin. When I left I went freelance with Kevin Bulmer, and we did Golden Axe. With the Mortal Kombat games, Probe just rang me up and needed somebody to do them, and then the last thing I did was Primal Rage. |
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