3 Ninjas Kick Back

The Game

3 Ninjas Kick Back is a licensed action platformer, which you'll discover going forwards was the 90s console's bread and butter! If it was even remotely popular, it had a game, and a lot of the time that game was an action platformer. This game is the perfect example of just what sort of things they turned into video games at the time. The film this was based on released the same year and had a worldwide gross box office of $11,798,854, which adjusted for inflation is around $25 million. For reference, that would be like if 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple or Primate had video game counterparts in 2026. Licensed games were everywhere!

It was developed by Malibu Interactive, who made various games for the SNES and Mega Drive before their parent company was bought out by Marvel Comics and shut down in 1994. This was the last game they developed. It was published by Sony Imagesoft, and was one of the last games published by Sony on a Nintendo platform before their separation after the Nintendo PlayStation incident.

Gameplay

As for the game itself, you choose one of the three titular ninjas: Colt, Rocky or Tum Tum. Each one has a different weapon (children running round with swords and sai in the 90s was all okay, I guess!) but they all play identically, which removes any replayability from the game completely, and the game then loosely follows along with the plot of the movie.

It's set across 5 worlds broken up into different levels, and there is a nice bit of variety in the mechanics of the levels. You have your straightforward point A to point B, left to right, platform levels, you have more open platform levels where you have to think about where you're going and how to get there, and levels where you're being chased by a giant rolling rock and you have to keep on the move. The variety in these styles does break the game up fairly well, but ultimately it does still get quite samey as time goes on. The game is simple in its design, but overly challenging in its execution, which was pretty common for the time to discourage someone renting the game and finishing it in an evening. With save states I was able to finish the game in just over an hour, which, for a full-priced game, is nowhere near good enough! So artificially inflate the difficulty, keep the players trying and increase the play time of the game.

The thing I found strange about this game was that one level was really detailed and full of quite cool interactive elements - throwing enemies into electrical fixtures, dropping things from the background onto their heads, pillows exploding when you slashed them with your sword - but every other level was just some sort of brown, outdoor borefest, and it just seemed like all their eggs were in one basket and by world 4 someone has just thrown that basket out the window.

I'm writing as though I really dislike the game though, and that's not entirely true. It's competent enough, and it's not broken. I went in with zero expectations considering the movie tie-in nature of the game and ultimately it was better than I thought, but not one I'd play again. Worth a look if you enjoy simple action platformers.

Graphics

Graphically the game is mostly pretty nice. The sprites are big and bold, the animations are nice and smooth, and the levels are fairly nicely detailed to look at despite most of them not having that interaction that one level had. The boss sprites are really nice, especially the boss of the Hospital level, a giant nurse brandishing a syringe at a literal child. There are certainly much better graphics on the SNES, but for a game released in the middle of the console's life cycle it could certainly have done a lot worse!

Sound and music

The sound effects are pretty basic fare for a game like this, with a small bit of digitised speech when you select your character probably being the technical highlight. The music, however, really had some promise. Each stage had some nice, catchy, and well put together music that was so close to getting a seal of approval from me and pushing this game into recommendation territory. Unfortunately, the problem with it is that it loops too soon, so you end up with a decently put together piece of music that ends up driving you crazy before the level is over! This is a real shame because it was so close, and it had every right to have an amazing soundtrack considering the man behind it...

The People

So this is the part where I talk about some of the people behind the game, where they came from and where they ended up, so I may as well start with the man behind the game's music and sound, Richard Joseph:

He was credited on 86 games including music for various Sensible Soccer games, various James Pond games, and Cannon Fodder 1 and 2, all of which I can tell you from memory have fantastic and iconic soundtracks. He also worked in dialogue post-production on The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. The man had a hell of a career that lasted until he unfortunately passed away in 2007.

The game's programmer Ian Sabine started as an IBM programmer on a game called Curse of Enchantia, released on DOS in 1992, and ended up working on the Devil May Cry HD Collection in 2012. He worked on some really great games like Pac-Man Fever, Metal Arms: Glitch in the System, and Rampage: Total Destruction, but he also worked on Boogie on the PS2 so…

I'm not sure what he's doing now because he blocked me on LinkedIn when I tried to ask him some questions about his time working on the game. Oops!

The last notable mention is Terry Lloyd, who worked on the game's map design and game design. He started working on graphics for a game called Wimbledon on the Commodore 16 in 1986 and worked continually up to a 2010 release on the Wii called Family Gameshow. Some of his notable works include Art Director on Gauntlet Legends, Artist and Animator on FIFA 98, and some graphics work on the GBA version of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

Box art

North American release, 1994.

In the 80s and 90s we would often buy our games purely on the strength of the box art and game description alone. The internet wasn't as readily available as it is now, and even when it was it wasn't full of reviews at the touch of a button. Magazine reviews were alright, but you had to be lucky enough to get the right magazine reviewing the right game, with the right reviewer. Most of the time we'd buy second hand with some pocket money, and be looking at a wall of boxes of games that we'd never heard of. So in this section I'll take a look at the box, judge it harshly, and decide whether it would pass muster in the second-hand game shop, and if the writing on the back is even close to accurate.

In this instance the front of the box is just a copy of the poster art for the movie, so normally that would be perfect to draw someone's attention, except only about 8 people saw this movie so it didn't really work that way in practice. The colours are bold and striking, and oh so very 90s. But it does look like something knocked together in Paint very quickly. Couldn't they have at least cropped it so their feet weren't outside of the image!

As for the back, it has a nice selection of screenshots, but does give away the best-looking boss in the game, and the description has a few interesting points:

• Scorching hot graphics - Let's not go too far, shall we. They're fine.
• Interact with various items throughout your quest and use them to your benefit - Yeah, in one level.
• Intense two-player action - Can't comment on this one - didn't drag anyone else along for the ride!
• Tons of hidden passages and areas - I mean, I guess… There were a few hidden areas in a couple of levels.
• Awesome sound effects - No.
• Many nasty-looking bosses to defeat - 5, I think - again, they were fine.
• Over 12 huge areas filled with fast-paced excitement and dozens of secret rooms to discover - I really wouldn't call the areas huge, even for the time, and they keep going on about hidden areas - maybe they were just too hidden and I missed them!

Overall I give this box a rating of - Misleading. Inaccurate, and would've probably upset 8-year-old me.

The Press

Magazine reviews for the time were quite hard to find. There was no PAL release, so I had to search American magazines. I found a few adverts for it on the Mega CD in a buy 2, get 1 free promotion, so I think they probably had a surplus of copies just sitting around. Shocker for a game based on the second movie in a franchise that barely anyone watched. (How did 4 of these films get made?!)

Anyway, I managed to find one from a magazine simply titled Video Games and they said:

This sort of game is an insult to the intelligence of all thinking beings, but it must be reviewed. Does anybody actually care about a game adapted from a dismal movie like 3 Ninja's Kick Back? Hopefully not. That said, the game is your standard platform action with cutesy graphics that revolve around a trio of suburban ninja-kids who say witty things like, "Lets kick butt!" Been there, done that. Ho-hum. So when is that Sony Playstation coming out?

4/10

With another from GamePro magazine, which said:

Fans of the film might like it, but others should avoid these new ninja kids on the block.

2.5/5

That's all I managed to find on this one, and I have to say, while the review from Video Games is maybe a bit harsh, ultimately I do kind of agree with both.