THE EVOLUTION OF: THE LAST NINJA

Many of the great UK games developers of the Eighties were synonymous with just one home computer. Ultimate favoured the Spectrum, and while System 3’s Mark Cale respected the firm’s arcade adventures, he remembers thinking that he could better them with a Commodore 64 title that combined puzzle-solving and martial arts. “Some of the most successful games where you went around solving puzzles – in particular those from Ultimate – weren’t quite graphical enough,” Mark considers, “so what I really wanted was to have beautiful graphics combined with adventure elements. Guns had been done to death, and we had been very successful with International Karate, so we wanted to have combat with a variety of weapons, and put that into a feudal Japan environment.”

Having chosen an ancient Far East setting for his adventure, Mark named it The Last Ninja – after making its ninja hero the last of a clan. He then devised level designs with the same structure as the movies of a martial arts master. “Bruce Lee films like The Big Boss were like Japanese games,” Mark points out, “where you went through a level and had a boss at the end. So that was why I chose to do what I did when I designed The Last Ninja. Datasoft’s game was an all-time favourite of mine, but we didn’t want a side-on platform game, because I just thought puzzle games worked so well in an isometric view.”