Development
Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom was developed and released by Tecmo, who also did the previous two games in the series, Ninja Gaiden and Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos. It was released in Japan on June 26, 1991 (1991-06-26) for the Famicom under the title Ninja Ryūkenden III: Yomi no Hakobune; it was released in North America for the NES in August 1991. It was ported to the Atari Lynx in 1993 by Atari, and then Tecmo re-released the game as part of its Ninja Gaiden Trilogy Super NES compilation in 1995. It was released for the Wii's Virtual Console service in North America on February 18, 2008 (2008-02-18).
Ninja Gaiden III was designed by Masato Kato, who took over Hideo Yoshizawa's main role in the game's development from the previous two titles; In an interview with Kato, he said that Ninja Gaiden III needed "to go into a new direction". The game was given more of a science-fiction motif as opposed to the Cthulhu Mythos motif in the previous two titles; the enemies changed to look more robotic than in the previous games. The original intent from the developers was to make the game easier than the previous titles, "to create a game a normal player can enjoy". However, the perceived popularity of difficult video games in North America caused Tecmo to release the game for the NES with a much higher difficulty level than the Japanese version. They also decided to place the events of Ninja Gaiden III between the events of the first two titles in order to maintain continuity; they figured that it was too difficult to continue the story after Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos, so they developed the plot sometime before the events of Ninja Gaiden II that revolved around the game's main antagonist, Foster.
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