the 1973 film Walking Tall. This was also how he came up with the game's English title. In Japan, however, Irem of Japan's staff came up with the game's Japanese name as a reference to numerous tokusatsu television shows, most notably the Super Sentai series. Drew later created the concept for the other characters such as enemies. To illustrate the characters' sketches, Drew hired Gottlieb's well-known pinball artist, Gordon Morison. Drew's original gameplay ideas for the video game was for a 1-player, adventure-based, platform game similar to Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. However, due to the very successful game sales of several 4-player games (most of them being beat 'em ups), Drew added 3-players in an effort to compete with the 4-player games. While the title and characters were Drew's concept, Irem Japan programmed the arcade game, and modified the look of its prototype. Drew did not mind it being different, as he was thrilled about it being programmed by them. During the development of the two-player platform version, the two main characters were named "Willie" and "Mickey", named after Drew's two favorite baseball players of his childhood, Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle. During the development of the 4-player beat 'em up version, the prototype names of the four main characters were Captain Jeff (red), Nunchaks Sugar (green), Hammer' Eddy (yellow) and Naginata Jimmy (blue). Drew later came up with the final names of the four protagonists that are currently used in the finished version today, which the names are references to the four baseball stars during the arcade game's release: Jose Canseco (red), Ryne Sandberg (green), Roger Clemens (yellow) and Darryl Strawberry (blue). In Japan, their last names were changed to the names of their colors. Reception and legacy Despite being one of the top arcade hits of Japan while receiving good reviews from critics during its 1993 release, when compared to the sales of other kits sold at the time, it sold poorly in the Far East and especially North America. Of the 1042 units sold, only 50 units were sold in North America, making Ninja Baseball Bat Man quite rare (especially in the U.S.). Drew "was very disappointed with the effort by the US office". Despite all of this, the popularity of the arcade emulator MAME caused Ninja Baseball Bat Man to gain more popularity years later than it had when originally released. A year after its concept