System 3 (1982-1991 / The C64 Years) Documentary 

Superb work on this docu dude, really enjoyed it.

Clearly a lot of effort and passion went into this! Captivating from beginning to end and a very worthy tribute to the greatness of System 3's C64 days. You can rightly be proud of this one!

This documentary was a moving and nostalgic trip down memory lane! Fantastic job! You need to produce more of these!

Always a joy to see such a passionate guy bringing us back the memories of our childhood with loads of background information!

How can I put into words how emotional and happy your documentary has made me feel. Happy, happy days of years gone. Stunning, absolutely stunning. Very rare I can sit for any length of time but I sat through the whole documentary in one go. It's great to learn the background of the company as well as the games and found things out I didn't know. Again a nod to the time and care producing and editing the video, time and passion shows in abundance. Shared on our discord site for the members to enjoy, Simply put, superb 👍

oh ive been looking forward to this! Edit: I was able to go to a couple of PCW shows around the time i was 15-17, i was so excited to go to them, seeing the zzap guys in the flesh and playing microprose soccer a year before it came out was the highlights, really good memories.

The river crossing scenes were tough, and lets face it a bit frustrating, however I quite enjoyed the difficulty and eventually mastered that skill quite well. The music and graphics were excellent, it really pushed the C64 to it limits!

I ran a BBS on my Commodore 64. If you hit the site "BBS Mates" and search area code 902, then "Spitting Image" you'll find my BBS listing. I put it up in 1987 but it's been offline for 33 years.

That music was just da bomb back then and even now :O)

Played Vendetta today for the first time and i cryed as i am now... Thank you Stanley "Stan" Schembri for your message! Rest in peace! I will follow your advice as good as i can.

that’s great! thank you from Italy

Your documentaries always entertain me! I remember in 1986 working on a construction site and buying International Karate in my break! From that day on i became a System 3 fan!

This is very good indeed - your documentaries are so interesting!

What a great job You did, man!!! 👍👍👍Thank You so much for this phantastic documentary! Last Ninja 1 + 2 also are my most favourite C64 games ever. Superb graphics and gameplay and these awesome soundtracks still give me goosebumps. Thanks again and all the best from Germany. ✌️

A great walk down memory lane, quality documentary.

Loved this doco! Didn't spend any time playing IK or Ninja, but was ALWAYS a fan of the music and the graphics! So glad you got so in depth with the back stories and the artists involved. It's so funny how we, as kids and young adults, attached so much emotion to the artists, especially the musicians, and their involvement with the games, and they might be like "yeah, I guess I remember doing that" lol

What a womyderful video you made Bastich B for this legendary company, this really warmed my heart!!

Wow, that's a great piece of work. Fantastic vid.

Man this Docu is the best I watched about Retros so far! These old amazing days...miss them! The outro-music of your video threw me back into the realm of Kunitoki! Awesome 👍

Wow man. What a fantastic episode. You sure did your homework my friend. This was awesome!!

Great and elaborate documentary. Pure nostalgia as well as loads of new information. Thanks!

Great video Bastich, The Last Ninja was THE game to play when I got my C64. Still traumatised by those bloody stepping stones :)

Really well made documentary. Thoroughly enjoyed watching it. Thank you for producing it.

Such a great doc!

Lovely trip down the memory lane!

awesome watch, a sneak peek behind the epitome of my childhood, the c64 and the last ninja series by system3

Brilliant documentary - grew up in the U.K. as a kid with the C64 and previously VIC-20! Great memories of System 3 Went to quite a few of the CVG events and others. 😃

Your recent documentaries are simply awesome! Really great watches and I'm learning a ton about these companies.

great video, was kinda odd to see your monitor with stay puft on top. I have exactly the same look with stay puft. Keep up the great work.

What a fantastic documentary, thanks so much for putting this together. Brought back so many good memories with the last ninja games being my faves growing up.

Thank you so much for this amazing documentary 🙏🏻🌹

Great video! I always remember walking into the local games shop with my dad and the man working there was playing International Karate (C64), we were both blown away! The shop owner reluctantly sold us the last copy (that he was playing) and looked genuinely sad.

Great video with tons of awesome behind the scenes info! Thank you for all the work you put into this video!

Explaining to his mother that he had used the money from mortgaging her house to hire exotic dancers must have been interesting... Ton of fond memories of The Last Ninja games. Thank you for putting this together, it's a fascinating watch.

Another awesome documentary! Thank you so much for the tremendous work you put into it!

Dear sir, this documentary is truly epic and although i knew about and admired system 3 games, it is the last ninja series that i love the most of their games. .the moment on this documentary when the last ninja 3 intro showed up, it brought me to tears as i had forgotten just how epic that the music and graphics and intro overall really is. I have now added the last ninja 3 moog remix and mind in a box version to my liked songs on spotify to play in the car. You do amazing videos, i now have to fire up my west german made C128D tonight which iive had since 1985 as a twelve year old kid and play it.

Thanks for this, wonderful work buddy :D

been looking forward to more of your docos since your Epyx one :)

Great Story and video, i had Last Ninja 3 original Cassette (with beautiful package) and i loved than the first - the 2nd i play only on friends home -. Thank You!

Brutaly good documentary! Thanks for all the hard work you did!

Another brilliant documentary I realize that I missed many system 3 releases by being in America, but for the games I got I always held them as one of the top companies for my dear c64!

Unbelievable content. Depth of information is astounding. Having lived through the 80s as a teen and having owned many commodore machines, your video brought back very fond memories. PS: I sold many copies of the Ninja series as a teenager working in a computer store.

Last Ninja 1-3 is my childhood and one of the best games ever !

Loved the video and it led me to discovering new music (to me at least) on Apple Music, as I have added Matt Gray and Fastloaders to my library. Just subscribed and will be doing a deep dive into your other videos. Thanks for an entertaining evening!

Great video. The camera dolly among the boxes is 👌. LN2 music by Matt Gray is in my opinion THE best music on the C64.

Great video. You can tell you put a lot of time and effort into it. Well worth it.👍

I can't think of a better OST on the C64, than Last Ninja 1, and that's really, really saying something. C64 had a dump truck of awesome game music, but especially as a collective, Last Ninja 1 was like "next-level" awesome. The amiga versions are awesome as well, but the C64 versions will always be my favourites. What an incredible OST. Very nice coverage of S3 as a company in this era. It seems you encompassed everything rather well, as usual.

Wow, great documentary, thanks! I will never forget when I first saw and played The Last Ninja - from that day on I was hooked on Action Adventures and the C-64 :).

Really well done video... great detail and insight on System 3!

Just an incredible doco. Thorough with a deep appreciation of their contribution to us all. Just wish I could figure out how to run the multi part roms on the c64 Maxi! Well ✔ 👍

I've watched this 3 times and probably will watch it more Awesome insights dude

Wow, thank you for so much effort to creating this video! System 3 is my favourite Softwarelable for the C64! I bought me all games in the past. haha :) Great video and informations!!

I really enjoyed all the docu. Very good job 👍👍👍. I remember that, at the time, i had almost all those games. My favorite was vendetta, even if i had problems with multi-load cassette most of the time 😁😁😁good job again B.

One of my favourite, and most interesting companies of the 8bit/16bit era. Given the videos of this type of yours I've already seen, this should be really special. EDIT: Yup, sat through the whole thing, and it's absolutely brilliant! THIS is how gaming documentaries on RU-vid SHOULD be done.

Man I love your passion for the good old c64 I am a 36 year old retro nut and pc hardware fanatic. I just saved this video to watch when I hit my workout bike tomorrow. This vid is nearly exactly as long as my workout 90 minutes. I hope you know you are not just educating me about all things c64 but also helping me drop a few dodgy pounds lol. Well done you!!

Cracking watch, really interesting content! System 3 games were class with Myth and LN 2 personal favourites.

Very well done documentary, enjoyed a lot, thank you! :) Long live System 3

Hey B Man! Thanks for this Another great indepth Doco. Just the amount of research and fact finding you do proves just how much love and passion you really have for the C64 and everything related! System 3 made some Awsome games! My all time favourites of theirs was LAST NINJA 2 & IK+. I literally played those games to death. I wore out the disk on Last Ninja 2. Either that or the files somehow became corrupt. But in my opinion a game well worth buying again. Another big tick for the craft master!! for this doco. Keep up all the hard work you do. The channel is absolutely AWESOME!!!!😁

Thank you so much for this documentary. I played about half of their catalogue with Ninja Remix the odd man out. I played that at a friend's house. Ninja 1 and 2 I played so many times but I never finished Ninja 3. It was just too hard. Finally I watched a longplay of the game on youtube after nearly 30 years. 30 years, has it been that long.....?

Nice work! I really enjoyed this. Much appreciated.

So glad RU-vid threw this into my feed. This is a great doco! Subscribed!

Blimmin heck! Death star interceptor, that thing gave me nightmares!

Absolute quality games for the C64...count me in!

Wow, truly incredible work sir, Informative, insightful, beautifully edited and incredibly entertaining, You are showing serious skill in making documentaries I'm absolutely blown away can't even imagine the amount of work went into this. God I miss the old days system 3 will always be special to me. The number 1 c64 related channel in the world. Thank you so much for experiences like this.

I love System 3 and their games! Last Ninja rocks, man!

I can´t imagine how much time & work you spent to make videos like this. *Applause*

Top shelf doco. 👍 Does the subject matter true justice. The personal connection is very cool too.

Fantastic Documentary of one of the leading groups in C64 games industry with exceptional and brilliant game , i enjoyed very much to watch it !! hope you can do a documentary of Ocean group as well if you have the time and efforts. cheers!!

I didn't think I would be able to watch this whole video in one sitting. A very entertaining and well-presented video. You managed to get my attention. :) I really enjoyed the 'behind the scenes' stuff. Subbed. Looking forward to watching more videos.

loved this video. made me subscribe to your channel. the last ninja 1 + 2 were the pioneering games of the 1980's and the industry in general. i love playing the last ninja games to this day. thanks for the nostalgia. please try and do a video on the several different ports of the last ninja including the seemingly il fated reboots on several generations of consoles.

OMG! This is top quality content!

Fantastic doc.!! Being system 3 fanboy myself. I remember going up to there office harrow-on-the_hill and showing my game to phil. A lovely hot-blond secretary opened the door... They were really friendly and we could show our game. I have alot system3 articles from C+VG / The one. I whish i knew I could send them. But great doc enjoyed alot with some beers too :-)

Super super fantastic documentary well done mate I fully enjoyed this episode ❤️👍👍👍

Well done Bastiche - I think this even surpasses the Epyx documentary, due to the variety of material you have brought together. It must have been a mammoth task to make this! I thoroughly enjoyed watching it. It brought back many memories, but also I learned a lot of things I never knew about the company. Amazing work buddy!

Excellent, great work, thanks!

Ah...1987, last ninja year of release...my neighbour asked me to a 'pc convention'. I (10 years old) was expecting a big hangar size congress centre with of rows of computers and stands, but it ended up being a sleazy underlit basement-like venue, with guys selling homemade fast load cartridges and more the developper/ technical stuff which I wasnt interested in as a kid. But this was where I bought my original c64 tape copy of The Last Ninja. Fond memories...

Great work.That must have been a lot of work.

This is how to do a retro game documentary, awesome video Bastich!

Man I loved Ninja. One of my favourite games of all time.

one of the very best! great documentary

Yet another awesome documentary

Excellent video here, love to hear about the old UK devs back in the day. Some of the best games around at that time.

Shout out for American Ninja!! Loved those films!

Such a great video, thanks 🙏

Excellent video as per usual mate

Awesome work! You had details that even I didn't know about, and I've contributed a lot to The Last Ninja Archives :-) PS! Strange you didn't mention that Matt Gray worked as a song writer and producer with Xenomania, who wrote songs for a whole bunch of famous artists and groups.

Flimbo's Quest is my fave C64 game of all time. I go back to it at least twice a week and completed it (The Cart version) with out cheating.

Great video B, very informative 👍

Awesome company they were. Although I do have some issues with how they treated Matt Gray during his kickstarter

Okay, finally finished the video. What an awesome informative and compelling documentary! Bizarrely, I missed out on ... uhh ... _all_ of these games. And it's not like they were obscure in the USA either. But like ... well, for whatever reasons around here we loved Way of the Exploding Fist and just stuck with it. Dunno why? I guess it was mainly my brother who got games while I just incidentally played whatever he was into. For most of that time, he'd switched to the NES. In retrospect, the C64 hardware should have been able to do stuff better than the NES, but it would be a long time before demo coders really mastered the techniques. But as it was, the practical reality was that the actual games you could buy on the C64 generally didn't look as good as what was on the NES. But of course, the C64 had much more flexible capabilities, and these would prove to fascinate programmers for decades. The way the NES works is rather inflexible. Of course, there are other computers with interesting capabilities, but I kinda feel like the C64 gets more love since most of them have godawful sound. I find it hard to get pumped up for developing on a machine where I know the sound will be ... not good.

Fantastic doc.. watched it over a couple of very enjoyable weeks. I get the distinct impression that Robin Levy really didn't like Chris Butler much. :)

Good man: the Last Ninja is epic!

This was an excellent documentary. It’s funny because as kids, the world in which these games were birthed in seemed almost magical, but seeing it broken down like this, you soon realise that the reality was quite different. In the end it all comes down to blood, sweat, tears and the ugly world of business, but seeing it all demystified is fascinating in itself. :)

Great job on this 👏

Excellent documentary!!! Thks!!! P.S. Would be nice if you activate Closed Caption Subtitles!!!

One of the best C64 song.

Great video! I didn’t know they had so many good games beyond the Ninja series. Can you do more videos regarding the best games for the Commodore64? I rely on an emulator to play them, but there are so many, I don’t know the names of the really good ones. Games from my childhood such as Beach Head 2 and a handful of EA games stand out, but there are so many others that I missed as a kid. Thanks!

Awesome, I have to plan to watch this (1 hr, 39 min) but have been looking forward to this one ;)

What a great documentary, it was worth the HYPE. You mentioned a few guys passed away at the end. Did these guys die young? I though most old school C64 programers would only be in there mid 50's by now.

Video impeccabile,di alto livello.qualita' top