The problem was cramming in all those Chinese kanji characters. The problems started when they were told to make the game have an option to choose between three languages. Getting the game on a HuCard was not really the problem. But the increase in power of a console also also means increased size of all assets.
The original Ninja Gaiden was a 135.4KB ROM. ”The ROM size conflicts was like trying to keep two dozens of adults alive while squeezing them into a Volkswagen Beetle without having to chopping off their arms or legs”, says Adam Siu. And while PC-Engine easily can handle a game like Ninja Gaiden the memory of the HuCard medium used for the console has its limits.
Adam worked on the games design, graphics and animation. ”It was our first formal assignment, before that we hadn’t have a chance to emulate anything on the development kit and we were learning on the way”, Adam Siu tells me. It’s mid 1991 (4 years after the release of the PC Engine) and the new team is tasked with porting Tecmo’s 1988 NES classic Ninja Gaiden to the PC-Engine. They just wanted more power and memory to work with. In the eyes of Hudson this was a successor to the Famicom. They designed it themselves and got NEC on board to manufacture it. In 1986 they felt that the Famicom had reached its limits and wanted a new system to make games for. And Hudson would continue to support the Famicom longer than any other company by releasing the last developed game for it as late as 1994.īut between that they also designed a new system. Their first releases were the popular Nuts N Milk and Lode Runner.
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This opened the door for Hudson -who until then had only produced computer software and games- to become the first company to develop for the system. Via contacts at Sharp they had gotten to develop programming software for the system called Family BASIC. In 1984 Hudson had become the first third-party developer for Nintendo’s Famicom. The PC Engine was manufactured by electronics company NEC but the design for the system was all done by game developer Hudson Soft. The idea was to make a port that was as close to the NES game as possible. Ninja Gaiden was the team’s first game and they had to learn developing for the PC-Engine as they went. It was a joint venture between Japanese game developer Hudson Soft and the Taiwanese company ERA Communications Inc. The game was ported by a Hong Kong based company called Hudson-Era H.K. Other games with the name are only based on the NES in a sense of gameplay but are really mostly different games. An arcade version on the Nintendo Pla圜hoice-10 system, which more or less is the exact same game as the NES version and a version for the PC-Engine. Ninja Gaiden was ported to two other platforms. Known not only for it’s great music, visuals and cinematic cutscenes. Released by Tecmo as Ninja Ryukenden for the Famicom on September 12, 1988. Most people with some interest in old games knows Ninja Gaiden.