Ron J. Fortier and Kelly Day‘s brilliant Bruce Lee shows that you can squeeze real character into tiny pixels if you try hard enough, what with it’s dozy sumo (The Green Yamo) and daft ninja chasing you down relentlessly, like idiots on the run. And punching and kicking them is not only hilarious, but also essential, if you are to keep them off your back.

Negotiating electrical traps, tricky jumps, and lethal spikes, the mini Bruce Lee is given much life by the energetic way in which he runs, jumps and moves around. The ‘clicky’ sound Bruce makes when he runs is also iconic. This whole game is iconic. And still great fun to play now.

There’s also a great simultaneous two-player mode where a second player can take control of Bruce‘s opponents. It’s great fun to try to stop Bruce as a second player, but probably not so much fun for player one, as it’s much harder trying to make progress when an actual second player is trying to stop them.

Bruce Lee was developed and published by Datasoft in the USA in 1984. US Gold published the game in Europe. Note that the Atari 8-bit version was the original and this C64 version came later, although it was developed by the same people.

Also: check out the excellent homebrew sequel.

More: Bruce Lee on Wikipedia