Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge, a spiritual successor of Konami’s ultra-popular TMNT arcade games of the 80’s/90’s, drops this week. Tribute Games and Dotemu revealed that the beat-em-up will be available on most consoles, PC and game pass on June 16th 2022. This is definitely one of the most extreme cases of “SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!” that I’ve ever come across.
There was a time when I thought it was weirdly strange that TMNT keeps getting rebooted for new generations. Now, I think it’s just a sign. A touchstone that the core idea is ultimately just goofy fun that is flexible enough to be presented in lots of different ways. A lot of people don’t really understand how amorphous TMNT is. It has changed hands so many times, has come around with a variety of different styles and tones, and succeeded in some instances and failed in others. Turns out that turtles who are ninjas and teenagers and fight aliens is actually a premise that works in all kinds of styles and forms of media. Who would’ve guessed?
I think it’s not necessarily about selling nostalgia. I think we have to consider the impact that each version of the Turtles had on the general public. The original cartoon is the one that had, by far, the biggest impact. Not saying that other versions were bad, but not one of those came even close to how popular the original cartoon was.
In Shredder’s Revenge, I don’t think the developers deliberately chose to use that version (o.g. cartoon version) of the turtles for targeting a specific demographic, but instead chose it because that’s the one they themselves prefer and wanted to pay homage to. The look of the game so far feels, to me, more like a labor of love for the old turtle properties, and less like something that was made explicitly to capitalize on the good ole’ days. I mean, sure, a lot of sales will happen out of nostalgia, but unless something we haven’t seen yet goes wrong, this game seems on track to be BETTER than most turtles games that came out since the SNES years.
There’s also the fact that the creators are making a beat-em-up. Frankly, that genre was in its golden age decades ago and only gets sporadically touched on in the modern era. I don’t know if a HUGE market exists, but clearly the games industry is not focused on those kinds of games anymore, so if such a niche market exists, this game can capitalize on it. The point of games is to make money, right?
Sure, this is fan service because even though TMNT is the only 80’s property to have a title span almost EVERY CONSOLE GENERATION, the newer games where meh. That’s why 1989 was either an Easter Egg or an unlock-able life achievement.
The six player co-op looks like absolute chaos, the fact Casey Jones instantly wears a hat for some moves is straight heat and I’m holding out hopes for some DLC where you can play as the other versions of the turtles or a version of human Splinter before he became a rat. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge has the potential to be the greatest TMNT game ever made and beat-em-up of all time.