The Way of the Tiger – “Please insert Pole Fighting”

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The dawn rays of the sun greet you as you begin your preparations for the time of trial. Today you will become the youngest ever to challenge for the title of Grandmaster of the Five Winds. When your foster father, Naijishi, was murdered by Yaemon, the second Grandmaster stepped into his place. Now, many seasons later another of the Grandmasters has died and the position is open once more for there must always be five who lead the order. You have been invited to challenge for it because of your consummate mastery of the Way of the Tiger.

Avenger!, The Way of the Tiger Book 1, Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson, 1985

“At the time, ninjas were new and exciting and everyone loved them […] So basically ninjas meets Lord of the Rings was what we came up with and it turned into a hugely successful game book series”. So said author Mark Smith in 2013, quoted in Jonathan Green’s You are the Hero: A History of Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks, explaining how he and Jamie Thomson came to their The Way of the Tiger series. The history of ninja, and of books about them, goes back some centuries, but there was of course an implied “in UK popular culture” after “new and exciting”.

The Lord of the Rings element came almost by default from their route to The Way of the Tiger. In 1982, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, game designers and co-founders of British war-gaming titan Games Workshop, started the Fighting Fantasy series of books. That took the Choose Your Own Adventure concept, focused in on a fantasy setting derived from Tolkien via Dungeons & Dragons, and added some light roleplaying elements, such that you weren’t just making choices but tracking attributes and rolling dice. 

That series soon became very successful – apparently occupying the first three places in British book sales charts at one point – and they invited other writers to join them (with covers saying “Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone present…”). Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson wrote the eleventh Fighting Fantasy book, 1984’s Talisman of Death. It was particularly gory and particularly successful. (It also got an adaptation to PS3 and PSP in 2011).

  • Talisman of Death (Laughing Jackal, 2011, PSP)
  • Talisman of Death (Laughing Jackal, 2011, PSP) [screenshot from Pocket Gamer]

From there Smith and Thomson decided to strike out on their own and chose ninjas as their unique additive selling point. Reviewing the first two Way of the Tiger books in Games Workshop’s White Dwarf magazine, Chris Elliott wrote that “Plot and atmosphere may be a bit ‘Kung Fu meets AD&D’, but both [books] add a few new twists to the adventure gamebook formula, and deserve credit for that.” He didn’t mention that Thomson had been assistant editor of the magazine until the previous year.

Interactive books were not the only pop cultural medium in which drawing on certain culture from East Asia was the thing of the moment in the UK (and note how easily that review slid from ninja to kung fu). The same thing could be said for martial arts computer games, many but not all of them ports of Japanese originals. Enter into the picture Sheffield’s Gremlin Graphics, who signed a deal for the rights to The Way of the Tiger.

Gremlin had a vision for an eventual series of text and graphic adventure games, but their initial focus was something that could join the crowded fighting game arena and stand out. They brought together a team comprising Pete Harrap and Chris Kerry, who had each had their own previous #1 hits, Shaun Hollingworth, fresh from #6 hit Bounder, and Marco Duroe. They started working on a Spectrum game, although as was by then standard, it would also be ported to other computers.

Let’s do this in a proper Way of the Tiger fashion. Will you: 

  • Read about the martial arts games that had already succeeded in the UK? Turn to The Way of the Exploding Fist. 
  • Read about Pete Harrap’s route into making games and how Monty Mole put the mining into Manic Miner? Turn to Monty on the Run. 
  • Read about Chris Kerry’s introduction into games and how his fairytale adaptation shared something with early cinema? Turn to Jack and the Beanstalk.
  • Go for the Way of the Tiger? Continue reading.

Once Gremlin boss Ian Stewart made the deal for the book series rights, he handed the team a list of specific ninja moves mentioned in print to get into a game. They also had a couple of other ideas for how to make that game stand out. Just as Fighting Fantasy had combined Choose Your Own Adventure with Dungeons & Dragons, and the Way of the Tiger books had further added ninjas to the results, Gremlin were going to add something else zeitgeisty to the recipe of fighting games. That thing was going to be a third dimension.

  • The Way of the Tiger (Gremlin Graphics, 1986, ZX Spectrum)
  • The Way of the Tiger (Gremlin Graphics, 1986, ZX Spectrum)

They did not go about this like Knight Lore or even like Rock’n Wrestle, with movement in three dimensions. Instead, they made a game like all the other 2D fighting games, but where as you move around you see things in the foreground and background shifting in a way that gives a visual impression of depth. As Shaun Hollingworth described it to Mark James Hardisty for his book A Gremlin in the Works 1983-2015, “We triple-layered the sprites in the game – the background that went very slowly, then big block graphic sprites and the characters that walked up and down”. They named it ‘trigeminal scrolling’,and at least one review picked up the invented term and ran with it.

Since you need to move around to properly see the 3D effect, they mostly moved away from the fixed screens of The Way of the Exploding Fist and Yie Ar Kung-Fu, letting you freely walk left and right around a landscape like Kung-Fu Master. You still only take on one opponent at a time though. Rival ninjas, sinister floating robed figures, and dwarves each pop up once you’ve beaten their predecessor. Some of the inspiration for the graphics of those characters went back through several layers of the game’s inspirations. “I bought some lead figures from Games Workshop”, Pete Harrap told Hardisty. “Quite a few of the [characters] were taken from Warhammer figures […] I used them mainly for proportions.”

  • Way of the Tiger (Gremlin Graphics, 1986, MSX)
  • Way of the Tiger (Gremlin Graphics, 1986, MSX)

Warhammer designs and a handful of moves aside, there wasn’t that much from the books left in the game. You have big meters for ‘endurance’ and ‘inner force’ which are character attributes in the book, but they don’t work in the same way and are mostly decorative. The engagement with the concept of the ninja is shallow and basically just a costume, although the books with their various names that are meant to sound Japanese but often don’t even have the right phenomes weren’t exactly doing much better. The game has very little in the way of narrative at all. 

Looking to at least include a chance to make a choice, as well as provide another way to stand out, Gremlin made three different forms of fighting that you select from the main menu. Unarmed Combat and Sword Fighting each take place to a different background, while Pole Fighting additionally takes place on a single screen. There is a Whole Game option that involves playing the three modes in sequence with associated huge loading times across two cassettes.

The Way of the Tiger is not a game that has aged as well as some of its simpler inspirations. The fighting feels much looser than The Way of the Exploding Fist but also much slower than Yie Ar Kung-Fu. The setup where you walk around at will loses any of the sense of occasion for each opponent. The 3D effect is limited and a little janky, and the graphical compromise to achieve it is a lack of colour. It’s not quite a situation like Valhalla where the game’s technological innovations only serve to worsen the experience, but it does take a fair bit of reading contemporary reviews to get into the sense of how it succeeded.

“Watching someone else play the game is somewhat akin to watching a movie, there is action going on all the time and with the assorted effects happening in the background it all looks very convincing” said one Crash reviewer. The different modes really stood out positively too. “The key to the game’s appeal is variety” explained Computer & Video Games. “Each stage provides an original challenge, and you can really feel yourself becoming more competent with the pole and the sword.” John Gilbert in Sinclair User compared it favourably to its predecessors and said that “Gremlin’s game is bigger, better and brighter – it even adds a strand of adventure to the genre.”

Not all were so positive even in 1986, especially when it came to the (very similar) ports to other Z80-based machines. One reviewer in the new Amstrad-focused Crash sister publication Amtix appreciated the pretty graphics but “couldn’t get used to the gameplay and found that sticking to using a single move got me through quite a few characters”. That complaint was also picked up by a letter writer in Popular Computing Weekly: “I breezed through all three parts in no time […] Infuriated is not the word for it”. “This isn’t a title to rave about despite the superb graphics, unless you are a Kung Fu fanatic” said MSX Computing. “Nevertheless it’s bound to be a big hit with children.”

The charts don’t record how many players were children, but The Way of the Tiger was a big hit, hitting #1 in the UK chart and selling well for a while. Still, Gremlin didn’t try for a direct follow-up. Having also decided that 1986 was too late for commercial text adventures, they instead tried to jump on a different bandwagon, basing sequel Avenger on the template of Atari’s Dungeons & Dragons-derived arcade game Gauntlet. Avenger became a modest hit towards the end of 1986 before eventually hitting a chart peak of #9 nearly a year later.

Having not exactly used much from the book series The Way of the Tiger other than a name and aesthetic, Gremlin didn’t take it any further than that. The book series itself only extended as far as a sixth book in 1987, before an unplanned ending on a cliffhanger thanks to publisher wrangling. Co-author Jamie Thomson would end up moving into the world of video games. He worked on an unreleased MMO for Eidos in the late ‘90s (based on another series of gamebooks, Fabled Lands, that he co-authored with Dave Morris) and his later credits included writing on Fable III. Gremlin Graphics, meanwhile, flexibly sprang away to other things with the same ease with which they had moved into the space of a ninja fighting game loosely based on an interactive book. They had made the right choice at the right moment.

Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 05 April 1986, Popular Computing Weekly

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