International Kickboxing

International Kickboxing from 1993 is an unusual case. It never shipped through normal channels — it is a covertape game from the magazine Your Sinclair, specifically issue 89 of May 1993, and it was never made generally available. Brian Cross wrote it, so the formal publisher is the magazine house Future Publishing.

That alone tells a story. By 1993 the commercial ZX Spectrum software market was essentially dead — the big companies had long since moved to the Amiga and the PC — and the only thing keeping the platform alive was exactly this kind of magazine cassette. The games on them were often the work of individuals and the quality swung from unplayable to better than the commercial releases of the day.

This one belongs to the better half. It is a one-player kickboxing fighting game, a genre defined on the Spectrum by International Karate and Way of the Exploding Fist. It supports cursor keys, Kempston and Interface 2, and runs on both 48K and 128K machines.

Its ZXDB user score sits at around 7.2 out of ten, which is very respectable for a covertape release. Players evidently remembered it better than most of what appeared on those tapes.

Expectations should stay realistic, though. Fighting games on the Spectrum never had the fluidity the Commodore 64 or the Amiga offered, animation is frugal and the move set is limited. Treat it as a late and honest attempt to keep a genre alive on a machine that was already eleven years old.