Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom

Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom is a 1991 platform game developed and published by Tecmo for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). It was later ported to the Atari Lynx by Atari Corporation in 1993, and was also re-released as part of Tecmo's Ninja Gaiden Trilogy Super NES compilation in 1995. Long after, it was released for the Virtual Console service in North America in 2008 for the Wii and in 2013 for the Nintendo 3DS. It was designed by Masato Kato, who took over for Hideo Yoshizawa, the designer of the first two games in the NES series.

The game is the third installment of the Ninja Gaiden trilogy in terms of release, but is chronologically set between the first two games in the series, Ninja Gaiden and Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos. Although the American box art and in-game dialogue suggests that the game takes place years after the first game, The Dark Sword of Chaos supposedly takes place one year after the first, while the Japanese version takes place in between the first two games; the ending screen briefly makes mention of this. The player controls Ryu Hayabusa as he is framed for the murder of Irene Lew and investigates the circumstances behind her death. He eventually discovers a plan by CIA agent Foster and another person named Clancy to utilize an interdimensional rift to create and control a race of energy-infused superhuman mutants. The game features similar gameplay to its previous two Ninja Gaiden titles and includes some new features such as the ability to hang overhead from pipes and sword power-ups.

As with the previous titles, Ninja Gaiden III received mostly positive reviews from critics. Early reviews praised the game for its plot, gameplay, and difficulty; later reviews criticized the plot, level designs, and the game's difficulty level, in which the North American version was intentionally made harder than the Japanese version through limited continues, stronger enemies, and omission of a password system. The Atari Lynx port, while receiving general praise for graphics and controls, received poor reception for its sound and for the inability for players to see characters and items, attributing it to the Lynx's small screen.