TMNT’s Original Arcade Game Was a Licensed Game Done Right

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

More pizza toppings don’t mean a better pizza. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles might like to put a bunch of ridiculous nonsense on their pies, but it’s hard to deny the simple pleasures of a slice of plain cheese or pepperoni when it’s done right. A similar declaration could be made about video games, and as cool as it is to see the medium constantly pushing the boundaries of new technology, sometimes less is more. Take for instance Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge, which went back to basics, iterating on everything that made the original TMNT arcade game so beloved without losing sight of its charm.

Shredder’s Revenge capitalized on millennial nostalgia for the original arcade game. Some of that nostalgia might be tangled up with fondness for the original cartoon or happy childhood memories, but it’s worth putting into perspective exactly how much that original arcade game was the intersection of great ideas implemented well at the center of a maelstrom of “right place, right time” circumstances.

The fact that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and video games intersected at all was serendipitous, and almost definitely wasn’t part of the plan from day one. While Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird were having their “Eureka!” moment over a drawing of a tortoise with nunchaku in late 1983, the video game industry was collapsing on both ends. The recession caused by “atari shock” decimated the home console market, while the arcade scene was floundering due to the oversaturation of mediocre games and backlash to moral panic.

The sorry state of video games in the early eighties might explain why some of the most beloved kids’ properties are all but absent in the video game space. G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and Transformers all conquered Saturday morning and after-school airwaves, toy aisles and comic racks, but their presence on cartridges and in cabinets was sorely lacking. He-Man got a text adventure. The most memorable G.I. Joe game was released five years after the cartoon’s final episode aired, when its earliest fans were likely entering high school. Transformers got a game, but it was exclusive to Famicom and only released in Japan. Also, you had to play as Ultra Magnus, the “is Pepsi okay?” of truck-shaped Autobot leaders.

Obviously, video games got back on their feet. The arrival of the Nintendo Entertainment System revitalized the home console market, and arcade games got a second wind thanks to some technological advances and outraged parents finding other things to be offended by. In the time it took all that to happen, a black and white independently published comic called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had snowballed in popularity enough to attract the attention of a licensing agent. A cartoon was produced to herald the arrival of the action figure line, and from that point forward it was a feeding frenzy of product tie-ins, which included video games. The Japanese game company Konami was quick to adapt the property for both the arcade and the home console.

The Nintendo game hit store shelves in the summer of 1989, a year and a half after the Turtles made their TV debut. There’s some nostalgia for that game, but there’s more unresolved trauma from that f**king water level with the bombs. Anyway, despite fears that home console game sales would cannibalize arcade game profits, that wasn’t the case for Konami’s Ninja Turtles arcade game, which started showing up in arcades later that fall. It would be the company’s most successful arcade game, the most profitable arcade game of 1990 overall, and such a beloved licensed game that my editor thought it was worth writing 1500 words about 34 years after the fact.

In 1989, the idea of a co-op multiplayer beat-em-up side scroller was a fairly new concept. Double Dragon was the first arcade game that allowed two pals to share a screen and walk down the street whaling on goons, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles took Double Dragon’s feature and doubled down. It wasn’t the first four-player arcade beat-em-up (it was a close second to Crime Fighters, which Konami also developed) but it was the first one to let players pick from four unique characters, rather than just the same dude in different colors. The game would have been a lot more confusing if the cartoon show hadn’t deviated from Eastman and Laird’s original vision in one key way: color-coding the turtles, rather than keeping their original matching red bandanas.

The best thing a licensed game can do is translate a core theme from its source material into an original game mechanic. The swath of beat-em-up arcade games that featured four (or more) player co-op makes it easy to gloss over how perfectly it captured the Ninja Turtles’ team dynamic, but it’s up there with the original Spider-Man 2 letting players swing through an open-world New York, or Batman’s “Detective Vision” in the Arkham Games.

A four-player co-op arcade game in general is a pretty brilliant cash-grab, since it inhales quarters at quadruple the rate of single-player cabinets. A similar logic may have something to do with TMNT’s merchandising potential. After all, you gotta have all four turtles! Not completing the set just doesn’t feel right.

Everyone has their favorite turtle, as well as their favorite turtle to play as in the arcade game. They’re not always mutually exclusive. There have been countless arguments over who has dibs on which character, but compared to other co-op beat-em-ups, the Turtles’ almost-palette-swapped look softens the blow of not getting your first choice. Playing as Mikey when you wanted to be Donatello doesn’t sting quite as much as playing as Marge when you wanted to be Bart in The Simpsons, or drawing the short straw in X-Men and getting stuck as Dazzler.

A four-player co-op arcade game in general is a pretty brilliant cash-grab, since it inhales quarters at quadruple the rate of single-player cabinets.

Aside from the multi-colored bandanas, another thing introduced in the cartoon that made its way into the arcade game is how much the Ninja Turtles love pizza. Other beat-em-up heroes restored health by eating food items they picked up off the ground, but the Turtles strictly ate pizza. Realistically, eating any food item off the ground is likely detrimental to your health, but pizza that’s been sitting on the sidewalk in a box is probably slightly more hygienic than eating a roast chicken you found under a garbage can.

In any case, not only is pizza an appropriate power up to have in the TMNT arcade game, it also adds to the experience if you’re playing the game in close proximity to pizza. That might seem like a mozzarella-esque stretch, but considering the ubiquity of arcade games in pizza places and pizza in arcade game places, that’s some pretty strong synergy and/or brand-agnostic product placement. Chuck E. Cheese, for instance, may claim to be “where a kid can be a kid,” but it’s also the only place a kid can eat pizza, roughhouse with their siblings, get scolded by a giant anthropomorphic rat, crawl around in big pipes that may or may not smell like human waste, and pump tokens into the TMNT arcade machine until the Technodrome is totalled. If anything, it seems like Chuck E. Cheese is the place where a kid can be a Ninja Turtle.

Playing as Mikey when you wanted to be Donatello doesn’t sting quite as much as playing as Marge when you wanted to be Bart in The Simpsons, or drawing the short straw in X-Men and getting stuck as Dazzler.

In a lot of ways, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game set the bar too high. It’s unrealistic to expect that all future Turtles games would offer the same four-player excitement and faithfulness to the source material while also scaling to look and play as well in present day as the arcade game did in 1989. It doesn’t help that a lot of adult TMNT fans’ memories of the original arcade game is likely tinged with nostalgia for those childhood birthday parties.

A massive AAA co-op Ninja Turtles game set in an open-world filled with bad guys to pummel would be great. Really, Gotham Knights would have been a great Ninja Turtles game. But Shredder’s Revenge is one hell of a consolation prize. If you’re old enough to have fond memories of the original arcade game, you’re old enough to order pizza and invite your friends over to play couch-op. Shredder’s Revenge even doubled the number of players in co-op, which is great for anyone who’s managed to make and/or maintain friendships with more than three people over the last three decades.

Since the early nineties, licensed video games have gone from an invasive species to an endangered one. It’s awesome that we’re getting highly evolved AAA games based on other media that are committed to being more than cash-grab tie-ins, like Marvel’s Spider-Man, Star Wars: Jedi Survivor and Hogwarts Legacy, but it’d be nice to see more throwbacks like Shredder’s Revenge. Much like the noble Galapagos Tortoise, the type of licensed games we got in decades past seems rough around the edges, silly-looking and a bit clunky compared to the competition, but much like those big dumb reptiles, they’re still loveable enough that we should keep them from going extinct.