When launching from Gog Galaxy a window for The Making of Karateka pops up and then disappears. I can Launch the game directly from file explorer however but clearly this is not as intended.

after several launches direct from file explorer and about half an hour of playing around now it launches from galaxy....... so, I guess solution is to randomly run the game directly until it wants to launch from galaxy? GAH! Pc gaming... ^^

Just wanted to mention that I've been running into this too and it's quite frustrating.

Thanks to your post, though--specifically the part about running the EXE manually working fine--I realized the problem is likely with Galaxy rather than the game... I tried disabling the GOG Overlay (go to "Manage installation > Configure..." then the "Features" tab) and it _seems_ to have fixed it for me. Though, as you mention, the bug appears to be random, so maybe I will still eventually run into a crash. Fingers crossed!

Still, it does seem like the Galaxy Overlay is causing bugs in other games too--in Baldur's Gate 3, for instance, it caused the loading screen to show for _much_ longer than usual (like 3-5 minutes). Since I don't even use the overlay, I'm just going to disable it globally ("Settings > Game features > Overlay").