Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles entered video games as early as 1989, and in two forms at once: Konami's arcade beat-'em-up, licensed from the Mirage Studios creators and riding the wave of the newly popular animated series, put four brothers through cooperative battles across the sewers and streets of New York, while the NES action-adventure offered a more open take on the city, control over all four turtles, and a punishing difficulty best remembered for its dreaded electric seaweed stage. The contrast between the two showed right away that the brand could work across genres at once, a strategy Konami kept pursuing across platforms in the years that followed.

The NES then added Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game (1990), a direct, visually upgraded port of the arcade brawler, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project (1991), which expanded the beat-'em-up formula with new weapons and turtle-swapping. Alongside these, the Game Boy hosted its own line of entries — Fall of the Foot Clan (1990) and Back from the Sewers (1991) as compact action-platformers, and Radical Rescue (1994), which instead leaned toward interconnected exploration closer to a Metroidvania.

The series' peak, though, belongs to the arcade and later home release of Turtles in Time (1991, ported to the SNES in 1992), whose fluid brawler combat, striking style, and time-travel hook still make it the brand's most acclaimed game. After that high point came a longer stretch defined mostly by games tied to contemporary cartoons, including Game Boy Advance and GameCube titles linked to the 2003 animated series and again published under Konami's banner.

After years out of the spotlight, 2022 brought a major comeback with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge for Switch, developed by Tribute Games, which deliberately revived the visual style and pacing of Turtles in Time, offered co-op play for up to six people, and was welcomed as one of the finest tributes both to the brawler genre and to the franchise itself. Its success showed that the appetite for a classic, grounded take on the turtles had never really gone away, more than three decades after their first virtual outing.