Rag Doll Kung Fu has a unique and important place in PC gaming history.
Steam’s newly automated monthly top-seller list now lets you go all the way back to 2004, and it’s been a fun way to take a trip down memory lane. And as Jody noted, it’s shined a light on one particular oddity: Rag Doll Kung Fu.
Chances are you’ve never heard of it, but this fighting game has the honour of being the first ever third-party game to come to Steam, back in 2005. That’s before the release of The Orange Box, even—back then it was basically just a launcher for Half-Life 2. And then it suddenly had martial arts puppet action too.
It was created by developer Mark Healey. You might not recognise the name, but you’ll certainly know games he’s worked on. He was at Bullfrog during the Dungeon Keeper days, and when Peter Molyneux left to co-found Lionhead, Healey went with him and worked on Fable and Black & White.
Rag Doll Kung Fu was a project he worked on while he was there, in his spare time—apparently based on an amateur martial arts movie he’d made with his friends, footage of which is sprinkled throughout. Shortly after its release, he left Lionhead to co-found Media Molecule, and worked on the LittleBigPlanet games and more recently Dreams. That’s right, despite his role in PC history, he ultimately abandoned us for the PlayStation.
I can’t speak to the quality of Rag Doll Kung Fu myself—I’ll admit I never played it at the time. My understanding is that it’s a sort of Smash Bros-adjacent party fighter with stretchy physics and some iffy racial stereotypes. Whether it deserves a re-appraisal or not, I can’t say.
But regardless, its place in the history books has long been assured. It’s easy to take Steam’s dominance of PC gaming for granted now, but there was very much a time when it was seen as annoying and pointless. Without developers like Mark Healey taking a risk on Valve’s dream of a digital marketplace, the entire landscape of our hobby would likely look very different now. For that, Rag Doll Kung Fu, we give you the acknowledgement and respect you deserve.
It’s actually still available on Steam 20 years on, and for only a dollar too, if you’re curious to experience a piece of PC gaming lore for yourself—though I wouldn’t be 100% confident of it running on modern systems, at least not without some work. It is also flatly “Unsupported” on Steam Deck.
I’m a bit surprised to discover how few user reviews it has, though—it’s sitting at a Mostly Positive (73%) with just 68 reviews, which makes it look like a random bit of shovelware rather than enshrined gaming history. But then, it did launch eight years before Steam reviews even existed, which might explain it.
Nonetheless, it continues to receive the odd review every now and then. User mudkipi, for example, did so as recently as November last year, and somehow got a free copy (are they still giving out review code?). As they so wisely put it, “They ragging on my kung til I fu”. As worthy an epitaph as any for a truly historic game.
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