Roughly 35 years late, Jean-Claude Van Damme martial arts movie Kickboxer is getting a videogame from some former Call Of Duty developers.
One of the movies that helped turn Jean-Claude Van Damme from a muscle-bound wannabe to a global action star, 1989’s Kickboxer is getting a belated videogame adaptation.
The game is in early development at a new studio based in Los Angeles. Called Force Multiplier Studios, it was founded by a team of veteran designers whose previous work includes Call of Duty, Borderlands, and – perhaps most significantly, given the team’s debut – Mortal Kombat.
Kickboxer: the game will, according to some comments from the studio published by IGN, “combine the rich narrative of Kickboxer with kinetic martial arts action to deliver an intense, high-octane brawler, and feature iconic characters and locations from the franchise originally starring martial arts icon Jean-Claude Van Damme.”
What hasn’t yet been divulged is whether Van Damme will lend his likeness to the venture. Force Multiplier says it has licenses “to many characters and likenesses from the Kickboxer universe” but hasn’t mentioned anyone by name. “We’ll have much more to share later this year,” the studio adds.
Read more: The forgotten Mortal Kombat klones of the 1990s
Although widely dismissed by critics at the time, Kickboxer was a huge success for its distributor, Cannon Films, and, along with Bloodsport, established Van Damme’s brand of high-kicking martial arts. Van Damme failed to show up for the four sequels released in the 1990s, but was coaxed back for the 2016 reboot Kickboxer: Vengeance and its 2018 sequel, Kickboxer: Retaliation.
There’s no word yet as to whether Kickboxer will be a traditional one-on-one fighting game akin to Mortal Kombat (which took inspiration from Kickboxer, funnily enough) or a brawler like, say, Streets Of Rage 4. Whatever form it takes, we hope it includes a minigame where you get to dance and do the splits for bonus points…
