Past meets present: The Ninja Saviors: Return of the Warriors

In 1988, Taito released an arcade game called The Ninja Warriors. It was a belt-scrolling beat ‘em up whose main attraction was that it was played on the same three-monitor setup of Taito’s 1987 shooting game, Darius, giving you an ultrawide environment within which you would fight off the forces of the President of the United States, Banglar, while playing as robot ninjas. Got all that? The Ninja Warriors is fine and all, but fairly basic for a beat ‘em up even for the time, with a severe lack of variety in your move set and little to do besides move forward and admire the view.It had a solid run in Japanese arcades, debuting at No. 3 in revenue among upright machines in April of ‘88, but it slipped out of the top 10 a few months later and was out of the top 15 before the end of the year. A success, but not one that persisted forever by any means. Part of why it’s still as known as it is might be because of what happened next, in that another studio, Natsume, saw the potential in it,…