For many people the name Leonardo conjures up thoughts of da Vinci, one of history’s most brilliant artists, but if you were a child of the Eighties or later it probably brings to mind his namesake – the leader of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Starting off as a cult comic before ballooning into an enormous multimedia franchise, few aspects of youth culture have been able to escape Splinter’s pupils, and videogames are no exception. However, the Turtles licence is no run-of-the-mill cash grab, as plenty of the games have been very memorable.
If you grew up with a NES in the UK, chances are you got it because it was bundled with the first-ever Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game – or Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, as we called them in our ninja-averse part of the world. Konami’s action game saw you primarily working your way through scrolling platform environments and beating up enemies, with the goal of retrieving the Life Transformer Gun from Shredder in order to free Splinter from his rat form and make him human again. Although the game is a solo affair, you play as all of the Turtles. “Obviously when someone thinks of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, they think of the team dynamic between the Turtles themselves,” says Thomas Church, designer at Digital Eclipse, the team behind Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection. “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for the NES made great use of this aspect by allowing players to dynamically swap between the turtles whenever they’d like and incentivising use of said mechanic by having each turtle retain their own health bars.”
OBVIOUSLY WHEN SOMEONE THINKS OF THE TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES, THEY THINK OF THE TEAM DYNAMIC BETWEEN THE TURTLES THEMSELVES
THOMAS CHURCH
Top-down sections facilitate travel between the platform areas, with the Turtles fending off enemy attacks as they go. “Looking at the design documents in , you can see that Konami’s designers wanted to craft something new and unique around the story of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They were clearly inspired by the idea of travelling underground through the sewers and selling a whopping four-million copies, with conversions later developed for a variety of home-computer formats.
