deathmtn

Via Set Side B, Ninja Gaiden - Developer Commentary

Mighty Bomb Jack, the first game I directed after transferring from sales to the development department, was a hit, and so I'd earned the trust of the president, which in turn meant he felt comfortable throwing curveballs my way whenever they presented themselves. One day, I was summoned to his office once more:

"Ninjas are in vogue in America right now, so make a ninja game! Listen up, I want something that goes ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-taaaaaaaa!"

At that moment, I had mental flashes of a ninja kicking their way up a wall, with a ta-ta-ta-taaaa!-esque tempo. Soon after that meeting, I ordered a ninja magazine from America; that magazine made me realize that the American image of a ninja sat somewhere between sorcery and kung fu, as their merchandise pages featured things like nunchaku alongside shuriken and kusarigama.

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The game's maps were designed on Tecmo's specialized map paper. For each stage, we'd first decide the total number of horizontal screens for that stage, and then draw the terrain for each screen, with a focus on that up-to-down-to-up stage pathing, as well as maintaining a balance between the visual appeal of the terrain vs. the difficulty of traversal.

Once the terrain was laid out, I decided which enemies would appear and when/where, through the use of a homemade viewfinder: I created a scale out of cardboard with a screen-sized window cut out of the center, which could be slid around the paper map to simulate scrolling. Ryu, the player-character, is locked to the center of the screen, and thus the center of the scale, making it easy to visualize which part of the screen would be visible to the player at any given time.

This is awesome. If I had the patience to draw a ton of buildings, I’d do this today.

By arranging these tilemaps, it would be possible to create the kinds of backgrounds we were after, and so the programmer was considerate enough to create a "construction mode": pressing the Start button during the game would bring up a 32x32 cursor, which could be moved with the D-pad and cycled in order by pressing A+Up/Down. Once you'd gone though this process and assembled a stage layout, you could press Start once more and Ryu would drop down from the top of the stage, allowing you to test your layout right then and there, which was extremely convenient. (The collision data for the terrain was baked into the 32x32 tilemap.)

I wonder how many other classic game devs had a Mario Maker?

By the way, the international title is "NINJA外伝", with "外伝" written as kanji and "GAIDEN" rendered as furigana. That was another idea that came down from the president: "Americans love kanji!".

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To ensure this, I thought it important to connect these scenes to the players' emotions; players' excitement is at its highest immediately upon buying a game, and maintaining their excitement is crucial.

The story is long and detailed. All of the anecdotes involving the president of Tecmo are great. He’s living caricature, not unlike the president in Pikmin 2. Oh, also, the most Asian salaryman-like sentiment ever appears:

I'd only been at the company for around five years at that point, so we talked about how we should both keep giving it our all!