The 80's were the decade of the ninja, as there was a plethora of games and (often very cheaply produced) movies focusing on ninjas or at least sporting the word ninja in the title. By the time the first Ninja Gaiden game saw the light of day, Sega already had a success with Shinobi, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were emerging from an independent comic parody to a massive merchandise phenomenon that would spawn their own line of video games. The Last Ninja was sneaking around in everyone's Commodore 64, and there where dozens of other ninja games available in the arcades and on home consoles. Especially in the US, there was a downright ninja craze, which resulted in movies and games that where "made" into ninja products upon localization. See the Legend of the Mystical Ninja series, whose main hero, Goemon was a thief but not a ninja at all (though his sidekick Ebisumaru was), or the many campy ninja movies, courtesy of the genius director Godfrey Ho, that where often cut together from a non-ninja Asian movie and scenes with Caucasian people in ninja suits. A movie title like "Ninja in the U.S.A." probably will put a smile on the face of everyone who played the Ninja Gaiden arcade game, and there where dozens of other ninja games available in the arcades and on home consoles, like The Legend of Kage, Ninja Warriors, Ninja Jajamaru-kun or Shinobi.

It was in this very time when Ninja Gaiden first saw the light of day. Originally, the actual Japanese name of the Ninja Gaiden series was Ninja Ryuukenden, meaning something like "Ninja Legend of the Dragon Sword", but was renamed Ninja Gaiden for the American release. That is somewhat irritating, since Gaiden is Japanese for "side story", as a lot of gamers probably know by now, but the game wasn't a spin-off of anything else. It MAY relate to Ryu going to the USA and thus somewhat having a side story to his everyday ninja adventuring in Japan, but more probably it was just a name Tecmo thought Westerners would be able to pronounce (at which they were terribly wrong, and to this day people keep pronouncing it as "gay-den"), but we'll never know for sure. On the other hand, even the title "Ryuukenden" didn't make too much sense in the arcade game, either. It seems "Gaiden" was at some point considered to be used in Japan as well, as Chris Covell unearthed an old Famimaga issue from January 1988, that introduces it by that name (whereas the Nintendo Fun Club News first called the game Dragon Ninja as a tentative English title).

In Europe, however, there used to be a problem with the violent connotations the word ninja brought with it, and even the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were redubbed to Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles and often scenes sporting evil ninja weapons like the nunchuks in action got edited out. Ninja Gaiden, too, had to become "Shadow Warriors" for the European market (not to be confused with 3D Realms' FPS Shadow Warrior) until the 90's, and for some cover images Ryu had to take off his face mask, though the games themselves remained identical to their overseas counterparts.

Amongst today's video gamers, Ninja Gaiden is certainly most famous for Tomonobu Itagaki's re-invention of the series. With its combination of a pompous presentation and the revival of lost video game traditions of pre-casual gaming times, it has won numerous worshippers. At the same time, mainly due to its unforgiving difficulty level, there are almost as many haters as for Itagaki himself, who often presents himself as an outspoken, if sometimes arrogant, rock star wannabe.

But that was just the tip of a newly emerging iceberg. Remakes for old brands could be seen as a trademark of what was then the current console generation, and so everyone who actually beat the game (at least in the initial Xbox version) found himself with access to a part of Ninja Gaiden's history and thus a few of the best 8-bit action games ever, which still a lot of people claim to be superior to their new sibling.

80's Ninja Flicks

When the first Ninja Gaiden came out in 1988, a ninja was the absolute coolest thing to be. It's no surprise that it started in the arcade, like all cool old video game series. At that time, beat-em-up games had become pretty popular thanks to Double Dragon, and what else would a ninja do than to beat people up? Yeah, you can say stealth games where first introduced in 1981 with Castle Wolfenstein, but they still weren't cool and/or playable at that time. Even beat-em-ups were in their infancy, though, and there still wasn't that much variation on Double Dragon's formula, which also the very first Ninja Gaiden follows.

In that respect, it actually isn't too bad. There's a badass intro sequence of a ninja - or should I say THE ninja, Ryu Hayabusa - killing a guy in a Jason-style hockey mask. When you actually play the game, of course, it throws these guys at you in the hundreds. Lack of variety plagues the genre up until today, but Ninja Gaiden suffers especially greatly from it. Most of the standard enemies, which are no more than seven or eight in total, are introduced in the first level. When you start fighting them, you'll discover that you have a standard attack combo, a cool move where you jump and flip the enemy in mid air, and a kicking move that is activated while hanging from a pole, at your disposal. The arcade game actually had a specific button on the tip of the joystick for jumping on these poles. Other than its archetype game, Double Dragon, where you mash up your enemies with head butts, elbow checks, jump kicks, grabs and whatnot, not to mention a decent variety of weapons, in Ninja Gaiden, you're left with a pathetic set of three attacks, and the only weapon you'll ever get to use is a ninja sword, which gives you exactly one new combo... and even then, that's only activated for a limited time whenever you grab the power up.

Japanese Arcade Flyer Illustrations

Nonetheless, the game is still good to kill some time, especially when you bring a friend for cooperative play. The saving grace from boredom often are the various "traps" in the stages, that usually force you to use your climbing skills, like busy streets, lakes, or bottomless pits. The backgrounds are fantastic, and are filled with detailed billboards or graffiti art. There are nice cutscenes throughout - the greatest one being Ryu's dilemma scene in the continue screen, where he's strapped to a slab with a buzzsaw slowly lowering towards his chest as the timer counts down. When it hits zero, the screen turns into bright red before it ends, although there's technically no gore. There aren't very many better incentives to get you to stick in another quarter. It also sports some cool enemies, like big guys who try to hit you with a tree (!) or the three small bosses with claws, who first pretend to be one huge giant under a cape. But what makes Ninja Gaiden stand out the most style-wise are your ninja maneuvers. As mentioned before, Ryu has the ability to cling on poles to climb or attack enemies. On top of that, every time you run towards a wall, he does a wall-run back flip, a move that's still good to brag about your martial arts skills, and it even can be used to escape from being cornered by your enemies. And cornered you will get. Like every game that was designed to eat your quarters, it's hard as hell and can easily get frustrating. Unlike most beat-em-ups, which let you walk forward at your own pace, and only stops when there's enemies to kill, Ninja Gaiden autoscrolls forward most of the time. The US and European versions are even harder, since some enemies can hurt you more easily, and don't even hope on seeing the later levels in ports that only give you a limited number of credits.

Speaking of ports, Tecmo sold the license for European home computer ports to Ocean, who exploited it extensively, so that the Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, Atari ST, Commodore Amiga and C64 all saw their own versions of "Shadow Warriors". The US got Ninja Gaiden for PC-DOS and, later, Atary Lynx. Strangely, there doesn't seem any home port to have existed in Japan, that is until it was included with Ninja Gaiden Black on Xbox as an unlockable bonus content, which is a straight, arcade-perfect emulation where you even have to press a button to simulate inserting a quarter.

A panel from the manual/comic to the Atari Lynx version.

Back in the day, though, the most faithful version was the one released on the Amiga. Not only was it the only port retaining cooperative play (until the emulated version in Ninja Gaiden Black, that is), it also kept most of the graphics the way they where, only adapting them to the color palette and slightly smaller sprite size for the system. A few animations where gone, though, mainly stage entry sequences for Ryu and the bosses. The enemies didn't fit on two disk sides, either, so you where put up against more of the Jason lookalikes, now amounting to ridiculously high numbers. On top of that, they act more cowardly than in the arcade version, so you'll probably experience some losses due to the time limit, at least when playing alone. The greatest problem is the fact that you're limited to four credits and there are no checkpoints either, so you have to start from the beginning of a stage after losing all four lives, unless you're in 2-player mode. Combine that with the single button limitation of the Amiga, which makes for overly complicated control schemes. If you don't have someone at hand to play with you, you'll probably never see more than the first two stages.

The ST Version is almost identical to the Amiga game (right down to the insane difficulty), but its different aspect ratio led to a big fat black bar on the left that housed the on-screen displays, and the ST couldn't handle the scrolling - instead you got page-shifting kinda like in the first Zelda game, but not as smoothly done. The music sounds quite different from the ST's sound chip, and the tracks lack some voices, but it still sounds better than the Mega Drive-esque FM sound from the arcade version.

It's all downhill from here. Next let's talk about the CPC and Spectrum, whose ports are also similar to each other, despite the rather particular hardware limitations of these two machines. Here you're given at least six credits, but that doesn't help you, because the enemies are even more tenacious, and when you get surrounded by two enemies, you're pretty much lost. Luckily, you will never get surrounded by MORE than two enemies, since all the other ones stand around like zombies and can't be hit until you beat one of the first two. You can see the "unique" graphical presentations of these two ports on the screen shots, on top of that, the CPC game again has no scrolling, and neither version has any music beyond the title screen.

Now it can only get better, you say? Think again, because next we'll handle the C64 port, which is really nothing but utter garbage. There's only two enemy types, no clinging onto bars, no traps in the stages, no swords, no music, no credits, nothing. Have fun... The PC version could actually be better than that, but it probably wasn't programmed with newer machines in mind, and even after throttling it down with DOSBox, the timing is somehow wrong, and there is no way to get anywhere far before the time runs out.

In 1991, the game got finally ported for the last time (well, at least for the next 14 years), to the Atari Lynx. Ironically, after being stripped down to handheld format, it turned out to be the most playable version ever, due to the much fairer AI that makes it possible to play this game through even with the limited number of two credits. Sadly, it's missing two whole stages, while on the other hand it has some extra animations that aren't in any of the other ports. The graphics and sound are pretty decent for the hardware too.

MP3s Download here

Stage 1 - Shadow Soldier