Ninpek title screen

Following Bug Hunter, the trio of Petters, Chun, and Smolski needed to make a new game. Their previous two games were a little… uncommercial, maybe? Bug Hunters was an interesting but kind of difficult to grok puzzle strategy game about mutant bugs, and Barbuta is… challenging. But there’s something big sweeping the nation in 1983… that’s right, NINJAMANIA! Ninjas are REAL in right now, let’s make a game about that! And so we get Ninpek. But is Ninpek just the trio selling out, or is it worth a look?

Ninpek starts off the bat with an extremely impressive innovation: scrolling. Scrolling to us today feels like a no brainer, like yeah, what about it? But in the early 80s, this shit was hard to get working. And ESPECIALLY on microPCs at the time. Smooth scrolling on DOS basically wasn’t solidified and commonplace until the 90s, and the LX is no DOS. It wasn’t really commonplace in the home until… gee, Super Mario Brothers? And that’s after Ninpek. So Ninpek was MASSIVELY ahead of its time. It’s not choppy either, it’s smooth scrolling.

Ninpek

Ninpek is a game where you play as a ninja, and your hoagie gets stolen. I call it a hoagie, it could be a burger. Anyways, you gotta get your hoagie back. That’s it. There’s a cute little intro, and then you’re off. The screen auto-scrolls to the right, and you run and shoot your way around. Very early arcadey platformer, the most obvious real life analogue might be SonSon, which in 1984 in arcades, was impressive. And this is 1983 in the home. I do feel this is a BIT of a temporal anomaly? Like, when I say it’s ahead of its time, it’s REALLY ahead of its time. It also for some reason reminds me of Chubby Cherub, but I have no idea why.

It’s not very complex. Run, jump, shoot. You move alongside the screen, so you constantly gotta fight against the screen in order to hit things in front of you and not run into them. It takes a little getting used to, but it’s mostly just weird to our modern sensibilities. For the time, it made sense. When enemies die, they drop little blobs that will give you points. You don’t get points until picking up the blob, incentivizing a bit of hectic and occasionally risky maneuvers to get your shiny points.

Ninpek

The game ALSO has music for the first time! While no one is directly credited with anything in the game, Petters is credited in later games for sound and music, so assumedly it was his composition here. The music is pretty pleasant, IMO. It’s VERY Ninja-y. Which y’know, makes sense. This game feels very VERY Japanese, though it’s important to note I have no fucking idea what country this company is from. Parts of them feel British, American, and Japanese, all at the same time. And kinda nothing helps symbolize that more to me than a section in the game with little collectibles. They’re cherries, then you collect enough, and they become rice balls. Mmm, jelly donuts. Then collect enough of THOSE, and they turn into… coffee! Coffee is a pretty common sight in these games, these devs love their coffee.

Anyways Ninpek is nothing like, transcendent, but for an early 80s arcade platformer, it’s stunningly ahead of its time and quite enjoyable. I cherried it on my second ever attempt, which in this case means two loops through the game. Pretty challenging, but a good challenge.

7.5/10