Mark Cale had a vision, a plan to “do something a bit different, something that would really capture the imagination”. Like the creators of The Hobbit and Valhalla a few years earlier, he wanted to take inspiration from existing adventure games but create something less fixed. He has sometimes mentioned text adventures as a starting point, but his game would not involve any typing of commands. As he described it to Retro Gamer in 2005, “what we were essentially trying to do was take the square cursor blob from Adventure on the Atari 2600 and turn it into a fully interactive 3D adventure.” It would be a tough journey, but the results would prove a resounding success. 

  • Adventure (Atari, 1980, Atari 2600)
  • Adventure (Atari, 1980, Atari 2600)
  • Adventure (Atari, 1980, Atari 2600)
  • Adventure (Atari, 1980, Atari 2600)

That reference to an Atari console game is a fairly unusual one in a British context. Still, while home computers soon became much more popular in the UK than Atari’s consoles had ever been, there were people here who got their start playing Atari games. A young Mark Cale was one of them. From there he moved onto Atari’s own 8-bit home computers, and when his early work as a photographer’s assistant brought him close to Atari and its staff, he was inspired to get involved in making games himself.

He and friends Emerson Best and Michael Koo came up with a plan for a company which would be named System 3 – a combination of the three of them plus ‘System’ from a System Studies computer science class Koo was doing at college. Koo soon dropped out of the plans, but Cale and Best didn’t change it to System 2. They launched System 3 in 1982, and their first game was 1983’s Colony 7, a conversion of a Taito arcade shoot-’em up they made for Atari computers. That went on to make it the UK Atari 8-bit top 10. Cale bought out Best to become sole owner a couple of years later.

  • Colony 7 (System 3, Atari 8-bit, 1982)
  • Colony 7 (System 3, Atari 8-bit, 1982)

System 3 built up gradually over the next few years as they expanded to more popular formats than just Atari’s. Mark Cale’s visions for the company involved a lot of promotional effort in multiple directions. When they failed to get any of their planned games ready in time for the Personal Computer World trade show at Olympia in September 1985, they kept their stand and put on a big show with dancers and martial arts performances. Cale switched attention to trying to make deals, and signed a mult-game funding agreement with Activision that gave them a percentage of proceeds and first refusal on American distribution of System 3’s games.

When System 3 did finally get karate sim International Karate out, and even more finally got Archer MacLean’s brilliant Commodore 64 version of it out, Activision turned it down, unimpressed. So it was Epyx that ended up with the huge U.S. #1 hit, and resultant plagiarism court case, of World Karate Championship, as they renamed it. With secure funding and a first big success, System 3 could be ambitious with their future plans, and would make Cale’s grand adventure, with a ninja theme partly inspired by the game Bruce Lee. When International Karate’s super sequel IK+ came around, Activision unsurprisingly took a different view, and released that one in the US as Chop’n Drop.

  • International Karate (System 3, 1985/1986, Commodore 64)
  • International Karate (System 3, 1985/1986, Commodore 64)
  • IK+ (System 3, 1987, Commodore 64)
  • IK+ (System 3, 1987, Commodore 64)

System 3’s first step for the adventure game that would become The Last Ninja was to try contracting it out to Novotrade in Hungary, via Andromeda. Novotrade was a company that worked by buying up Commodore 64s, at a time when they were priced out of reach of the majority of Hungarians, and loaning them out to maths and computing students. Andromeda, run by Robert Stein, was Novotrade’s initial route to the UK for their games. Together they’d be involved in making quite a few games in association with various British and American companies. My nostalgic favourite is Impossible Mission II from 1988. Novotrade later changed their name to Appaloosa and made Ecco the Dolphin, and I will be returning to them in 1993.

Mark Cale has at times been quite dismissive of what Novotrade managed to do for The Last Ninja, saying in 2015 that System 3 got their advances refunded as Novotrade “failed to even get a ninja sprite […] to animate let alone fight”. He added that International Karate on the Atari ST was the only System 3 game that Novotrade had ever managed to finish, and even that was only after a couple of British System 3 programmers made a visit to Budapest. In more recent times, though, he has said that Novotrade’s isolation from the Western games scene meant that they were able to think outside of the box more, and that they made crucial initial contributions to The Last Ninja. 

  • The Last Ninja (System 3, 1987, Commodore 64)
  • The Last Ninja (System 3, 1987, Commodore 64)

Novotrade’s biggest contribution was the ‘integrator’, a way of efficiently building up high resolution graphics screens from their component graphical parts. Together with graphic artist Hugh Riley, that helped to make The Last Ninja and its isometric 3D landscapes very visually impressive. Your Commodore later reviewed it as featuring “stunning graphics that have only previously been seen in static adventures” and, in Commodore User, Eugene Lacey wrote that “the beauty of the graphics will become apparent” as you progress, with “excellent backdrops”. (He also said that “the storyline is impressive and well researched”, an interesting description of a game whose ninja main character has a name, Armakuni, which doesn’t fit with the standard romanisation of Japanese.)

Eager to complete The Last Ninja without extending development even further than the eighteen months they were already looking at, System 3 turned to John Twiddy to get it done. (When it came out, the Computer & Video Games review of it still suggested it should perhaps be called At Last The Ninja). Twiddy had started programming while doing his A-Levels in Aberystwyth, then got his own Commodore PET and started making games. He had the good fortune to know Zzap! 64 writer Julian Rignall, who was impressed by what he saw and helped recommend Twiddy to some games companies. 

First was CRL, for whom Twiddy made the Commodore 64 conversion of Pete Cooke’s space simulation Tau Ceti. Just prior to The Last Ninja, Twiddy was also contracted by Elite to work on a conversion of Commando-alike Ikari Warriors. Both that task and the resultant availability of an Ikari Warriors machine in his living room distracted him significantly from his university studies. System 3 were able to persuade Twiddy to join The Last Ninja with a presentation of their concept. 

  • Tau Ceti (CRL, 1986, Commodore 64)
  • Tau Ceti (CRL, 1986, Commodore 64)
  • Ikari Warriors (Elite, 1988, Commodore 64)
  • Ikari Warriors (Elite, 1988, Commodore 64)

Twiddy soon appreciated both the graphics skills System 3 had available and how far progressed they already were on the game compared to the laborious graphics work he had been doing on Ikari Warriors. He told Retro Gamer in 2009 that “they already had plenty of graphics and Hugh [Riley] was very quick at creating animation sequences. He used a sprite editor and he would literally knock up animation sequences of fighting ninjas with no thought as to how usable they were in the game […] it’s probably the only game I’ve ever worked on where you have far too many graphics and you can actually pick and choose”. In Zzap! 64’s review when the game came out, Steve Jarratt wrote that “the animation on Ninja and his pals is simply gorgeous”.

The game that they used these gorgeous graphics for is one that gives you a fair bit of freedom, with enemies you can fight or skip past, different weapons to use, and some logic puzzles. The flexibility comes through an intricate control scheme where what each direction does is based on the direction you face and other context. “It’s not as complicated as some games like Rock’n Wrestle but it takes some practice” wrote Your Commodore. Zzap! 64’s Steve Jarratt took an even more positive view: “the precision needed to control all of his movements proves challenging rather than frustrating, and it really feels as if you are controlling a living being, not merely a bunch of sprites”.

  • The Last Ninja (System 3, 1987, Commodore 64)
  • The Last Ninja (System 3, 1987, Commodore 64)

The Last Ninja combines that control awkwardness/living feel with some extremely finicky platforming sections, giving you a high chance of dying early on to a botched river crossing. This was a somewhat deliberate approach in line with many games of the time, as Twiddy explained to Retro Gamer in 2005. “Because the graphics took up a lot of memory, we were very concerned that we didn’t have quite enough screens – it varied between 16 and 25 on each level. So we wanted to make certain that it took a fair amount of time to get through the individual screens”. “I gladly accept now that the jumping sections were too tough, because when I went back and tried it again years later I found it impossible!”

On release, none of those issues stopped the game from getting a wide range of acclaim, with its gorgeousness, freedom and novelty all outweighing other considerations. Eugene Lacey in Commodore User called it “an arcade adventure in the mold of Fist II or Way of the Tiger – but much, much better” before going on to say that “the attention to detail is exquisite”. C&VG concluded that “The Last Ninja is a winner”, Your Commodore called it “quite simply the last word in combat games”, and even the less overwhelmed Gary Penn of Zzap! 64 showed the priorities at play: “The Last Ninja’s gameplay isn’t anything special but the concept has been executed extremely well”.

  • The Last Ninja (System 3, 1987, Commodore 64)
  • The Last Ninja (System 3, 1987, Commodore 64)

The Last Ninja went on to be another System 3 cross-Atlantic success and, by some claims which I can’t find any evidence to verify, the Commodore 64’s best selling game ever. The appeal of its music and visuals are easy to get even now, though as a newcomer to it the rest of it is quite forbidding even by the standards of the time. Just trying to stand in exactly the right place to crouch and pick up an item is infuriating. Still, people certainly haven’t gone off it. When System 3 launched a Last Ninja-based Kickstarter in 2024, it was quickly funded well beyond their goals. 

Going back to that Commodore User review, it ends on a note for the future. “Last Ninja? — I hope not”. Eugene Lacey doesn’t seem to have finished the game (he wrote that “it’s going to take a long time to solve — but no way is this work”). If he had, he would have seen confirmation in the game’s ending that there was more planned to come. You pick up the scroll you’ve been looking for and then it ends abruptly with just a short message. “The quest continues…”

Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 20 June 1987, Derby Evening Telegraph

Top of the charts for week ending 20 June 1987

UK games: The Last Ninja (System 3, Commodore 64)

Japan games: Family Boxing (Namco, Famicom)

UK films: Mannequin

UK singles: The Firm – Star Trekkin’

UK albums: Whitney Houston – Whitney Houston

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