3 Ninjas Kick Back
The first game in my alphabetical project, and the first (of many) 90s movie tie in platformers! Based on the 1994 movie of the same name, and one of the last games to be published on a Nintendo platform by Sony.
- Developer
- Malibu Interactive
- Publisher
- Sony Imagesoft
- Released
- 1994
- Region
- North America
- Genre
- Platformer, Licensed
The Game
Write-up to come.
The bones of it: a licensed side-scroller built around the three brothers from the film, with the hook being that you switch between Rocky, Colt and Tum Tum rather than picking one. Released the same year as the film it is adapting, with everything that usually implies about the schedule it was made to.
Worth covering when you write this up:
- How the character-swapping actually plays — whether the three are meaningfully different or reskins with one gimmick each.
- Whether it belongs in the "surprisingly competent licence" bracket alongside Ocean's Addams Family, or the other one.
- How it compares to the Sega CD version, which had actual footage from the film that the cartridge had no room for.
Box art
North American release, 1994.
Notes on the box art to follow.
The People
Sony Imagesoft is the interesting name here. This was Sony's games publishing arm before the PlayStation existed, and it spent the early nineties putting out licensed titles on Nintendo and Sega hardware. By 1994 Sony had already fallen out with Nintendo over the abandoned SNES CD-ROM add-on and was months from launching a console aimed squarely at them — and was still, at the same time, shipping cartridges for the SNES. There is a whole write-up in that overlap alone.
Malibu Interactive handled development. Less well documented, and worth digging into.
Notes for expansion: confirm the Malibu Interactive team credits and what else they shipped. Check whether this saw a PAL release or stayed North America only. Confirm the player count.
The Press
To be filled in from contemporary magazines. Licensed film tie-ins tended to get short reviews, so US coverage may be the better source here.
Screenshots
Screenshots to follow.