Kung Fu
Introduction
Kung Fu was developed by Irem and published by Nintendo, released on the NES in 1985 as a home conversion of Irem’s own 1984 arcade game, known outside Japan as Kung-Fu Master. Loosely inspired by Jackie Chan’s film Wheels on Meals, the game has players controlling martial artist Thomas fighting his way up five floors of a building to rescue his kidnapped girlfriend Sylvia from the crime boss Mr. X, using punches, kicks, and crouching strikes against waves of enemies including knife throwers, dwarfs who attack low, and stick-wielding thugs, each floor capped off by a distinct boss fight. Its side-scrolling beat ’em up structure, simple two-button combat, and steadily escalating floor-by-floor difficulty made it an early template for the genre years before Double Dragon and Final Fight popularized the format further. As one of the launch-window titles available for the NES in North America, Kung Fu introduced many early console owners to martial arts action games and remains a historically significant, if mechanically simple, entry in the system’s earliest library.
