Fist II: The Legend Continues

01 · The adventure

Eight scrolls and a Warlord

A Warlord rules the land from a volcano, and the village elders send a young disciple of the Exploding Fist to defeat him. He cannot do it with what he knows: the masters of the Fist wrote their secrets on scrolls, hid them around the realm, and built meditation chambers where a warrior can learn them.¹ The player walks through jungles, temples, caves and mountains, fights the Warlord's men one on one with the punches and kicks of the first game, and carries each of the eight scrolls to its own chamber. The scrolls are what let him advance: without them the way is shut ($0405). The first lets him smash the heaps of stone that block paths ($0A59), the second opens the way across to the river ($36DE), the fourth lets him kick down trees ($0A44), the sixth opens the exits of a screen further on ($064C), and without the third the road into the volcano drains his energy to nothing ($0649). Inside it the Warlord's last guards wait, one to a room ($E609), and the room beyond them ends the game ($218C).

02 · The release

Beam Software's sequel

Beam Software, a studio in Melbourne, made games for Melbourne House from the early 1980s. Its Commodore 64 games include the adventures The Hobbit and Sherlock, Gregg Barnett's first fighting game The Way of the Exploding Fist (1985), Rock'n Wrestle (1986), Shadows of Mordor (1987) and Samurai Warrior: The Battles of Usagi Yojimbo (1988).⁶

Barnett, Beam's Commodore expert,¹⁵ had joined the studio in 1982,¹³ and his Exploding Fist had topped the UK chart for twelve weeks in 1985.¹¹ For the sequel, he later told Retro Gamer, "it would have been easy to just reskin the original game ... change locations and dojos, add new opponents".¹⁰ Nigel Spencer, who programmed for Melbourne House from 1985, describes what was made instead: "the Exploding Fist fighting engine combined with a platform game".¹²

Beam Software made the game in 1986. Melbourne House published it in Britain as Fist II: The Legend Continues, and Mindscape in the United States as Fist: The Legend Continues.⁷

The manual credits Barnett with the game design and programming, Greg Holland with the backgrounds and scenery, Russel Comte with the character animations and sprites, Nigel Spence, Trevor Nuridin and Bruce Bayley with the "graphic arrangements", Neil Brennan with the music and Bruce Bayley with the sound effects. The backgrounds were drawn with David Johnston's "Character Editor" and laid out with Nigel Spencer's "Map Editor".¹

03 · The reception

One week at number one

Fist II reached number one on the UK's combined formats chart for the week ending 18 October 1986, and stayed there one week.¹⁰ Commodore User's Ken McMahon expected it to be "the definitive Kung Fu classic" (November 1986), and Your Commodore found that "the idea of a quest rather than just straight combat works very well indeed" (January 1987). Zzap!64 was harder on it in December 1986: Julian Rignall thought it "looks unfinished and is completely overpriced", and Gary Penn called it "basically a big disappointment".¹⁰

04 · Inside the game

Explore how Fist II works

Each tab takes one part of the game apart, from the game's own code.

• Gameplay: the controls, the energy bar, the eight scrolls and the opponents, and how a blow is judged to land ($379C).
• Maps: all 123 screens drawn from the game's data, and how they connect ($4AEC).
• Solution: what each scroll opens, what stands in the way of the volcano, and a route there one scroll at a time.
• Graphics: every fighter in all 73 poses, the one body they share, and how each room is built from shapes and lists ($1556).
• Music: the three tunes, playable through the game's own music driver ($1247), and the sampled sound effects.
• Discoveries: secrets, a bug, a trapdoor, the places where the manual and the code disagree, and graphics nothing uses.
• Source code: the whole game disassembled and annotated.