Remember the Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Kickboxer? They're making a videogame of it now

Kickboxer - Training Montage (HD) - YouTube

Maybe you're too young to remember Kickboxer, the 1989 martial arts movie where Jean-Claude Van Damme learns Muay Thai in a training montage, kicks down a banana tree, and dances in a way that suggests his ballet training was all for naught. Even as someone who wasted a good chunk of my life watching martial arts movies, I only just learned that Kickboxer, er, kicked off a series that led to four sequels, a reboot, and a sequel to said reboot. And next: a videogame.

The founders of Force Multiplier Studios have Tales from the Borderlands and multiple Call of Duty games among their credits, but I can't imagine a brawler based on Kickboxer being much like either of those things. Though I do hope there's room in it for a dancing rhythm game.

In a press release, CEO of Force Multiplier Studios Jeremy Breslau said, "we can't wait to innovate the fighting genre with incredibly visceral combat and an emphasis on the environment and what you can do in it. We are crafting a dynamic brawler that will empower players to be the best kickboxers in the world, traveling to exotic locales and introducing new environmental combat mechanics to deliver a martial arts experience like never before."

Maybe "environmental combat mechanics" means you'll be able to kick a pillar to intimidate your opponent. Force Multiplier says we can expect to hear more about the Kickboxer game later in 2025.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.