Place bets now! How many people can Ninja Theory’s ‘70s-themed fighting game, that falls apart on purpose, rub up the wrong way? Betting ends!

For a studio standing at the forefront of modern gaming, Ninja Theory deals an awful lot in antiquities – types of game that have, often for entirely the wrong reasons, been exiled to history. It’s made good the contradiction, Heavenly Sword escaping PS3’s mangled launch to sell over a million copies worldwide. And it’s suffered for it, which is where Kung-Fu Chaos comes in.

Born during the developer’s Just Add Monsters days, when it was just a couple of guys and a gal with a wealth of experience but no cash, this 2003 Xbox exclusive ranks among the most misunderstood, wronged and plain unlucky games ever made. A B-movie showdown staged, literally, on a stage, fought beneath the gaze of a howling director named Shao Ting, it was as personal a party game for designer Tameem Antoniades, a self-professed Bomberman fanatic, as it was a commercial gamble for Microsoft, its publisher.

“I resigned from Sony to dedicate myself to design,” says Antoniades, in a Ninja Theory office mere feet from – of all places – that of Sony Cambridge. “I looked at about 30 combat games to see how they block, how they punch, how they move, what animations they use – and I wrote it all down. And I did that fulltime, day and night, for about four months.”

He slides the result preciously across the table, ring-bound and split into different facets of the game he had in mind. Little more than pamphlets at a glance, these unique design documents are jammed with pictures of radii, trajectories, causes and effects. Footnotes reference Mario 64 and Power Stone, the depth of analysis such that only one thing seems lacking: words.

“I wanted to create something that any artist, animator or programmer could break down and understand. And also the parameters that a designer would want to tweak and modify to get it feeling right. So I specifically avoided using Word docs because they encourage you to write verbally; I wanted to describe everything visually. I’ve not seen any design docs like it since, but it is how we do things now.”

Although Bomberman was, for Antoniades, “like a poker night played for two years,” he somehow found time to watch a melee of Hong Kong action movies, finding particular joy in those of Woolworths’ own Jackie Chan. “I loved that whole vibe: the interaction with the environment that he had, the stunts and things like that. And I loved the fact that they’d parody or create action equivalents of big Hollywood movies.”

Kung-Fu Chaos, then, was a parody of parodies – gaming’s parallel of flicks like Mr Vampire (which unwittingly lent the game one of its characters, Master Sho- Yu) and Amour Of God. But it wasn’t enough to revel in such a niche, and so the cast swelled to more widely reflect ’70s schlock, from blaxploitation (Lucy Cannon) to roller jam (Candi Roll). With a fake DVD cover that explains the game to a tee, Antoniades, with fellow Ninja Theorists Nina Kristensen (chief developer) and Mike Bell (chief programmer), took the fight to Microsoft.

moscallout“Then [Microsoft] came down and there were more of them than there were us, all of them demanding documentation”/moscallout“We were the antithesis of Microsoft at that point,” he smiles, “just a small bunch of people that were hands-on-deck, just-make-the-game. Before they signed the game, they came down to do a due diligence check – to make sure we were the real deal. We’d expanded massively from three people to eight, and even had an office. Then they came down and there were more of them than there were us, all of them demanding documentation. So we stopped working and spent the next month just writing. To their credit, though, we are still using those processes.

“They were getting a lot of stick; a lot of the bad press Sony’s been getting recently, they were getting then. And my experience was that they were new to it but extraordinarily smart. A lot of the people there were passionate, experienced gamers. And they understood things that people in the industry still cannot grasp: good pipelines, good production methodologies and a focus on play-testing and usability. In my mind, that’s a revolution in development – and it’s still not being adopted by publishers.”

Microsoft’s rigor, taken for granted now thanks to the extraordinary QA of Live Arcade and immaculate finish of its first party games, was a shock to the system in 2002. And when it came to this oddball – a game in which the fourth wall collapsed taking the other walls with it – friction was inevitable.

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