You know what’s cooler than an arcade machine with one big monitor? An arcade machine with three big monitors.
Taito’s 1987 release The Ninja Warriors is built entirely around that single idea. It used a huge cabinet with a main monitor in the center and two wing monitors mounted in the bottom, which were then reflected up to the user’s eyes with mirrors to flank the center display. You might have seen the famous and more common X-Men cabinet that’s sometimes still kicking around in local barcades which uses a similar idea; The Ninja Warriors predates it by five years.
The screenshot at the top of this piece isn’t an edit or a mistake. That’s really how wide the game is. It’s kind of hilarious and amazing, even nearly four decades later. I’m playing it on the Nintendo Switch thanks to the fantastic Arcade Archives release from Hamster, which you can get for about eight dollars. It includes all modern quality of life stuff like save state support, as well as some different filters for the display. It even has a mode that lets you replicate some particular quirks surrounding the mirrored displays of the original arcade cabinets. They had a tendency to be slightly off at the borders where the images joined, and this release has a special mode…
