You can't just port the notion straight across," he said.īringing a stealth game into side-scrolling 2D, and not the top-down 2D of the original Metal Gear games, is far trickier than it first might seem. "The design process involved looking at 3D stealth games, figuring out why they worked the way they did, and then deconstructing that and finding a way to translate it back down into 2D. Anderson wanted to recreate that same feeling. Despite the setting, the core gameplay tenets were all about the power of being unseen. In place of a ninja, Thief starred Garret, a lock-picking ne'er-do-well in the Middle Ages.
#Sneaky ninja thief series#
While there is a surprising lack of truly stealthy ninja games, there are plenty of core stealth games that don't star ninjas.Īnderson's inspiration was Thief, the classic first-person stealth series originally created by Looking Glass Studios. So I was like, 'Fuck it, let's just do that.'" But, for some reason that never really happened in games. "If you want to make a stealth game, you don't want to vomit out some long, complicated exposition like, 'Oh, you're commandos with psychic power, blah blah blah.' You just want to say, 'You're a ninja.' It feels like it should calibrate people's expectations appropriately, being stealthy and all that. Ninjas are trained not to be seen, so why do most ninja games involve creating as much chaos as possible? It wasn't a denigration of those games as much as a level of surprise.
But, in games, aside from Tenchu, anything with a ninja is just, 'Fucking murder all the dudes, blood, gore, cutting helicopters with giant swords.'" "The ninja as a fictional pop-culture construct affords things like being sneaky and undetected and agile and fast.
"That's kind of weird," the lead designer of Mark of the Ninja explained in an interview with Polygon. Nels Anderson did not want another Ninja Gaiden.