While the rebooted series is enjoying some well-deserved attention with the recently-released fourth entry, Tecmo’s classic Ninja Gaiden on the NES is still a favorite for many old-school gamer. Recently, it was discovered that this definition of “NES hard” has a connection to another classic sidescrolling adventure game (and a tough one to boot) in Konami’s Castlevania.

Per Shmuplations, who had done the work of translating a series of messages on social media from 2023 from former Tecmo staffer (and director of 1988’s Ninja Gaiden) Hideo Yoshizawa, it was revealed that Yoshizawa took inspiration from the first Castlevania game when designing Ninja Gaiden.

Yoshizawa stated that he was big into Castlevania at the time, and used the game as the basis for Ninja Gaiden‘s stage design. Despite this, the speed and tempo of Ninja Gaiden ended up being quite different from Konami’s effort. Not to mention that the “constant up-to-down movement” of Ninja Gaiden‘s gameplay turned it into something else entirely.

Yoshizawa’s team also took inspiration from Konami’s work in constructing the maps for Castlevania, which required a few technical tricks to pull off. “Until this point, Tecmo’s games, including Star Force, stored data in a 16×16 tilemap format,” wrote Yoshizawa. “In Mighty Bomb Jack, our horizontally-scrolling screens were constructed by combining sets of data meant for either the upper- or lower-half of the screen, but it was virtually impossible to produce Castlevania-esque backgrounds using this method. Upon further research, we discovered that Castlevania seemed to be using 32×32 tilemaps, with four 8×8 images combined into a 16×16 data block, and four 16×16 blocks merged into one 32×32 block.”

Eventually, the team worked out a way to create their own system using 32×32 blocks, as well as a nifty map builder.

The whole series of posts is definitely worth a read, going into the game’s famous cutscenes which were incredibly film-like for the time. Yoshizawa ended up coining the term “Cinema DISP” to describe the techniques used in these cutscenes.

Meanwhile, you can grab the latest entry, Ninja Gaiden 4, on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC via Steam and the Microsoft Store.

Thanks again to Time Extension for the initial story.