Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: How Season 1 Made the Arcade Game Great! (And why the NES game sucks!)

In 1989, at the height of Turtle Mania, Konami gave the world TWO TMNT games. Only one was worth playing. Why? (Chapter Markers and more below…)

Episode information
GTV 170 “Hard Shelled Fuzzy Memories" or "A Tale of Two Turtles" Season 9 Episode 10
Original Airdate: May 17, 2024
Produced May 7-15, 2024
Recorded at Butsudan Studios and edited on my 14” MacBook M1 Pro! Edited and produced with Photoshop and Final Cut Pro, all paid for with Gainful Employment™ while riding the train to work and home, back and forth, day after day, and lunch breaks too!

0:00 GTV ID: With Nunchucks Where Available!
0:05 Prologue: A Level of Clarity
1:42 Chapter 1: Remembering Turtle Mania
3:43 Chapter 2: TMNT for NES on Day One!!
4:35 Chapter 3: I Discovered TMNT Arcade!
6:07 Chapter 4: Connections to the TV Series
10:00 Chapter 5: The Cutting Room Floor and Future Games
11:55 Lights Out!!

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Partial Transcript

One video game that I can (and have) come back to time and again is the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game! At the time it was such an amazing breakthrough in gameplay, with 4 simultaneous players, not to mention bright graphics and THE hottest license around at the time. The game still holds up thanks to these 3 key features. A true future proofing, without realizing it.

TMNT Arcade is a topic I have wanted to come to for quite a while, and has been often requested, though unlike episodes of the past, that compared TV and game, Monster Strike, Keith
Courage, Magical Hat and all the rest, I was never sure quite how to handle The Ninja Turtles. Nobody wants to hear an old man gush over something made for kids from the 1980s, but the idea started to come together not too long ago when I discovered the Cowabunga Collection. I was able to digest all of the games from the Golden Era all at once and take stock of how this series of games were handled in the moment. That led me to go back and revisit the animated series, which I, like many of you watched religiously in the early days.

I didn’t re-watch the entire run, just the original 5 part mini-series that started it all. Watching these episodes, alongside playing the arcade game and others, led me to see connections between the game and the show that, somehow, I never put together until now. I guess after 40 some years you just reach a certain level of clarity…..

I can’t honestly recall when I first heard of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The original comic series began in 1983, I knew nothing about it. I’m not going to pretend I did.

I think we all got our first taste of Leonardo Michaelangelo, Donatello and Raphael in the animated series, with the accompanying line of toys and video games. I do recall though, around the time of the first movie, the local newspaper was running the daily series. So by 1990, you had The Turtles in every media.

We were all there for Turtle Mania, but everything happened like a tidal wave, where one day this thing didn’t exist in everyone’s lives and the next day, it suddenly did and was everywhere! Sometimes, one’s memories can’t create the perfect picture.