This is an awesome Kung Fu Master clone, with massive and brilliantly animated main sprites. The background flickered to give extra colours, and some of the previews featured some awesome sound effects to match a great promising preview. It feels very much like a 16-bit console title as a result.
Graphics are mostly by Shaun Pearson, who you will all remember as the creator of some of the best SEUCK games of all time, and some phenomenal C64 graphics and animation. A perfect person to do the graphics, and with some wonderful code, the game feels like a console game. Music is decent, composed by David Dewar who used to run Silverwing PD.
The preview comes in a series of parts, with separate intro scenes, levels with different enemies and big baddies, sound effects and end sequence. A mix and match.
Talking to Shaun, there was big things planned for this game, such as full screen interlaced smooth graphics, and very fast action… including some incredible bosses to fight against. Read his story in ‘Creator Speaks’ to find out more..
After some decent interest from Thalamus, Juned sadly lost interest with the game. Therefore the game never made it past these preview stages. It is possible that it was just a bit too late in the day as well for the C64, and Thalamus didn’t quite make it either.
In later years, we discovered that Frank Juerke took over development briefly past 1992, and kindly passed on the remains of what he coded. The game still didn’t progress much further it was just few bits and pieces of intro code done for another intro and outro sequence. We have also included the source code of both for you to have a look at. A big thanks to Richard Bayliss for compiling these for us!
There are also some other source bits on there which we don’t know much about. Maybe someone can enlighten us? Also in November 2024, Marcin ‘Tenchi’ Świętoniewski kindly put together some tidied up disks with all the files and intros that you can download and use. I’ve archived code and older files into separate folders.
The earliest preview has three levels where you cannot die, including dogs on the second level. In the second preview, there is only one level and no music/sfx – but you can die and there are some new mid-bosses present. There is also a final boss that animates too.
Download this, and absorb a wonderful preview and dream of what could have been.
Contributions: Shaun Pearson, Wai, Frank Juerke, Anonymous Contributor, Marcin 'Tenchi' Świętoniewski
“Koshimo was my idea. I loved the arcade game Kung Fu Master and couldn`t understand why there was not a similar game on c64? (US Golds attempt was so poor!!!).
Thamalus were really interested in Koshimo, the real problem was with the coder, he lost all interest, too difficult maybe?
The background were mock up`s. I would have improved them a great deal and added more polish and given them a more finished look. The bosses need lots of work. I think where we really succeeded was with the feel of the game.
I wanted full screen smooth scroll, with big sprites and very fast action!!! :D – oh and that awful FLI picture!!! aaarg!!! i never knew that got out. I really don`t like it, it`s not good, it`s very bad and i could have done so much better!”
Shaun Pearson.
Frank Juerke speaks about work on Koshimo…
“I always wanted to add something about Koshimo :-)
I don’t exactly remember the year when I was in contact with Deff/Avatgarde. After he sold some program for me and I did some coding together with him (together is maybe.. Hm, he had the idea and I did the rest.. :-)), he asked me if I could do some codework for him. There was an unfinished game, and he asked me to do the intro and the extro (is it called like this? The congratulations-part..) I received the pictures and charset I used, the music, and a working level one. After I finished that stuff he told me that the original-programmer had lost interest and asked if I could finish the game. Unfortunately I found that level one terribly boring, so I was not interested.
Here the things I were able to find about Koshimo. (Koshimo2.d64 and Koshimo.d64)
The 4 .asm-Files are quick conversions from the sources I found on the disks. Originally I used Professional-ass, and as that assembler wasn’t that popular nobody could easily read them today.
The other 2 disks contain all files I received or created for the game. I had a look at the stuff I found on the net, some files within the first disk might be interesting:
Load all the files about intro and type sys2061. I haven’t seen that intro anywhere.
Load all the files about Ende and type sys6336.
All the rest:… simply something, don’t know.
I don’t have any sources of the game itself. I think that all the other files on the disk (beside the game-preview I received) are either some rubbish I created while working on the intros or graphics I used in the intros. Surely no interesting animations or secret levels ;-)”
Frank Juerke.
Update history
19/11/24 – Updated archive with tidied up files thanks to Marcin ‘Tenchi’ Świętoniewski
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