Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time (Arcade) Playthrough

A playthrough of Konami's 1991 license-based arcade beat 'em up, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time.

Played through as Michaelangelo on the default difficulty setting. Once the game ends at 35:45 I let the attract sequence play on loop to show the different character profiles. Finally, at 41:07 I load up the service menu to run the machine's diagnostic sound test. Any excuse to blast more orchestra hits, you know?

Konami created a lot of arcade classics back in the late 80s/early 90s. Contra, TMNT, Sunset Riders, Asterix, G.I. Joe, Bucky O'Hare, X-Men, Vendetta, Violent Storm, Metamorphic Force... the list goes on and on, but few of them are held in quite as high regard as Turtles in Time.

It looked like a playable version of the cartoon to my eyes in 1991, and it knew how to kick things off with a bang: the intro plays a lengthy digitized clip of Pizza Power, a song from the TMNT album that was featured in Pizza Hut's Coming Out of Our Shells tour. What kid would've ever been able to ignore such a siren song blasting from an arcade cabinet's speakers, or to resist the appeal of the game's massive four-player control panel?

Just about anyone that can remember when it came out can tell you how impressive it was in its time. Video games as we knew them just didn't look like this yet!

And not just that, but it was everywhere! Arcades, bowling alleys, fast food joints, pool halls - I personally remember playing it at the Navy Exhange and the cart area of a Sam's Club back in the day.

The general consensus that has formed over the years seems to be that the SNES port surpassed the original arcade game, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree. It was better fleshed out with new stages, different bosses, a remixed soundtrack, and an improved control scheme. Those aren't knocks against the excellent arcade game though - they're just testaments to how far above and beyond Konami went in bringing the game home. The content differences and the more fluid animation make this one still well worth checking out!

Let's kick shell!

One last thing - I wonder just how many of us made up our own words to the intro because we couldn't make out the actual lyrics. I still laugh thinking about how my buddy Tim told me how he used to hear "we don't sleep with our parents."

In case you were wondering, here are the real lyrics:

Growing up in a glass bowl
with chameleons, lizards, and tadpoles,
it hardly enters your mind
that there's something better than this.

A lettuce leaf and a carrot,
maybe a seed from a parrot,
believe me when I tell you
the word gourmet just don't exist.

But pizza power,
a flying saucer food delight,
pizza power,
oh, that's what makes us feel all right.
____
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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