Retronauts - 479: Retronauts Episode 479: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection

Episode Date: September 5, 2022

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection is finally here, meaning we now have the chance to officially play over a dozen TMNT games from the eight and 16-bit era—most of which never saw a re-release! But how did this compilation come together, and what are the specific quirks of the many, many turtle-based games it contains? On this episode of Retronauts, join Bob Mackey, Henry Gilbert, and Digital Eclipse's Chris Kohler for an inside look at how the ooze is made. This episode is sponsored by Konami, who provided us with pre-release copies of TMNT: The Cowabunga collection. Retronauts is a completely fan-funded operation. To support the show, and get two full-length exclusive episodes every month, as well as access to 50+ previous bonus episodes, please visit the official Retronauts Patreon at patreon.com/retronauts.

Retronauts is part of the HyperX Podcast Network. Find us in more great shows at podcast.hyperx.com. This week on Retronauts, we reveal the secret of the ewes. Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I'm your host for this one, Bob Mackie. Today we're talking about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Cowabunga Collection, out now for all major platforms, along with some minor ones. And by the way, this episode is sponsored by Konami, who provided us with copies of the game before release. Hashtag ad, hashtag sponsor, just in case you're wondering. Before I go any further, who is here with me today? Who is here across the table from me as normal? It's appreciator of pizza power, Henry Gilbert. And who do we have on the line, our special celebrity guest who has something to do with this compilation? Hello, it's me, Chris Kohler. I'm an editorial director at Digital Eclipse.

And this is exciting for me because, you know, of course, I've been on retronauts on and off since 2006 since the very beginning. But this is the first retronauts I'm doing as the guest developer of the game we're talking about, which is pretty cool if you ask me. Now we can criticize you, Chris. That's right. No, no, that's not going to happen. There was that Penny Arcade. where like they put out a game and they you know they had the drew the journalist saying like uh you know what's what's a score lower than zero or something like that that's yeah that's what this is now

turnabout is fair play but yes chris you're now with the digital eclipse you've been with them for a few years now i i think you worked on the the blizzard uh collection of games and i think i'll run through it sure yeah so i joined uh just over two years ago uh in in july of 2020 We put up the Blizzard Arcade Collection, which was the Lost Vikings and rock and roll racing and Blackthorne. And then we did actually worked on the Space Jam game a little bit, writing a lot of the script for the Space Jam, a new legacy of the game. Then we did the update to Disney Arcade, sorry, not Disney Arcade collection, the update to the Disney Classic Games Collection, which is the one with Aladdin and Lion King.

We added in SNS version of Aladdin. We added in the Jungle Book and then a whole museum section dedicated to the Jungle Book. and then Cowabunga Collection, Teenage New Shirtle's Cowabunga Collection, August 30th, and then Atari 50, the anniversary celebration, which is coming out in November, and then more stuff, too. Wow, a lot of us happened in two years. It really has, a lot. And Chris, you were not with the company at this time, but it's because of Digital Eclipse's Disney Afternoon Collection that I am together with my wife.

Oh, my gosh. By happenstance, her work on the cover of that compilation brought us together. I don't think without that it would have happened So digital eclipse Thank you so much But before I go on So Chris up front is going to answer All of our burning questions

About the compilation, his work on it And then we're going to touch upon all I believe 13 games very briefly And maybe Chris's insights on What he learned about those specific games In the process of making this compilation Before I start though I do want to learn about all of our history

With the Ninja Turtles Now we did a Ninja Turtles episode earlier, I believe in summer of 2019, we did episode 230. That was just called Teenage Mutin Ninja Turtles in 1989, because it was 30 years later. 89 was the biggest year for the turtles

for the most part, and we discussed every turtle-related thing that came out that year. And I'm sure we told our stories on that one, Henry and I, but we can just briefly recap that. Henry, you and turtles, where do you start? Where did you end? How many action figures did you have?

In my memory, I didn't have that many, but then when I see characters on screen of these games, like, why that guy? I would say, I would say I probably had a good four dozen turtle figures bought over, and I had the blimp, and I had the van, and the thing that shot pizzas that were manhole covers. So, oh, and the skateboard that

Michelangela had. Now, when I list all these toys, though, know that these were shared between my brother and I who also loved Ninja Turtles. They were communal toys. Yes, yeah. Well, but yes, I love Ninja Turtles. It came at the exact time I wanted to see Ninja Turtles. I played all the games. I watched

the show for the first four years. The first two live action movies were events for me in my life. I walked around wearing multiple Ninja Turtles shirts, including one with my favorite turtle, who is Leonardo. I'm the boring guy who likes Leonardo, but it's sorts of cool. And then

I played many of these games, though also now that I've had some time to mess around with the collection, I'm also like, man, I was dumb. In 1994, I think I started thinking, I'm too good for new Ninja Turtles games. And when I see them in this,

I'm like, oh, my God, these, I would have, me and my brother played the NES ones together all the time. And then we missed out on a few that I know we would have loved. I would have made so many more happy memories with it. But my brother and I played a whole lot of the first arcade game, Turtles in time, and the first two NES games. And I also played the Game Boy game a ton.

And then a little bit of all the rest of the stuff in here. I guess we should also name our favorite turtle when we talk about the turtles. For me, it's Raphael, you know, because I am the cool but rude guy on Retronauts. And also, for me, I mean, I told my story on that episode, but for me, I don't really have nostalgia for the cartoon or the movie. I only had a few of the action figures. My nostalgia for Turtles goes back to these games because this is the way I interface with that IP the most. Like, I played everything in this collection except for a few of the Game Boy games. I was there for every one of these games.

In the four-year span that this compilation covers, I was playing everything, and I enjoyed all these games so much. And, yeah, I guess I kind of outgrew Turtles as Turtles was winding down in like 93-94. Like, I did, I dabble with Terminimate Fighters, but after that I was on two different things, like more adult shows like Beavis and Buthead and the Simpsons.

But I do have a soft spot for the turtles, but it really just is about the video games. Like, I think I can just go the rest of my life without ever seeing the cartoon again. maybe the first five episodes I'll go back and revisit one day but my nostalgia is on these Konami releases and Chris

what's your history with the turtles I think we were all appropriately marketed to when it comes to this gang of four oh yeah for sure well so I think I'm a little bit older than you guys so I mean I my whole thing was when I was that age was He Man and the Masters of the Universe

like those were all the those were the toys that I bought because I was born in 1980 and so by the by the end of that, I was kind of like, I was not going to, like, move on to another action figure, you know, collecting phase. So I didn't actually, when the Turtles kind of hit in like 87, 88, like, I was actually good on action figures. And in fact, that was when we had got an NES. So really, my desires to, like, own toys, but had kind of shifted into my desires to own NES games. And so my fandom for the Turtles was 100% kind of like localized in the games themselves. Like, we, we saw that

arcade, that four-player original arcade game, you know, fell in love with it because, oh, my God, here is this thing. And I think we talked about this when we, when we discussed the Simpsons arcade game on a, on a different podcast, all of us, but like just the fact that Konami was able to essentially create something that just like looked like a cartoon, sounded like a cartoon. You know, you're in the bowling alley of the arcade. You hear the Ninja Turtles music playing, and you look over at the TV that's embedded the monitor in this arcade game, and you see, like, the Ninja Turtles, you know, cartoon, essentially. Like, it looks like it's playing on this monitor because the graphics are so great.

And, I mean, it's this massive machine and the four joysticks. And, I mean, how could you not be attracted to that and go over to it and start looking at it? This incredible. And so, we played that, you know, we played the original Turtles game for the NES. And then, of course, we really wanted, you know, them to put the arcade version on the NES, which they then did and I just really like I knew that a new turtles game if a new turtles game came out that like that was something really special and that deserved to be looked at and so you know from turtles in time even tournament fighters you know so that was really like we saw I saw the movie

you couldn't escape it it was inescapable in those days it was so culturally powerful it was like the best selling toys the most popular games and TV shows and the movies was like the biggest indie movie ever you know um so even if you like i wasn't like a huge turtles guy but like it was just everywhere like the show was always on tv so i watched the show when i saw the movies and but really the games were a thing that i was super passionate about yeah i mean i think uh i know henry you were into he man right yeah i i came at the tail end of he man and transformers as as a kid did yeah i was born in 82 so that was winding down and that's why i think we were ready to be like, oh, TMNT is our thing.

Like that is, we're, we're two years younger than the, than Chris's generation who had the Transformers and G.I. Joe, like, those are the three biggies. He man, then Transformers and G.I. Joe, a couple years after that. Yeah. And, of course, one of those things, the difference of being a kid and being an adult is, like, those two years from like 87, 89, that was so big and so many things happened in it. And now, two years of video games is nothing to me. I'm like, oh, it took four years between these video games, and in its sequel, who cares?

Like, I'm the same person. That's like the time between a Dragon Quest release in Japan and America. I'm just like the localization. Right, right, right, yes. Yeah, I mean, not to go on too long about the source material, but for me, I think it was particularly successful because I was not into any other action show except for this. And I think why it really worked on kids, a lot of fun monsters, a lot of fun designs, but also humor was a big part of it, too. And I think I don't know how much the creators were drawing from other media, but I feel like it has a lot in common with anime and manga where there's like so much theming going on that that's why Power Rangers was the next big thing because the theming was so intense. It's like there's colors, there's weapons.

Like everybody has their own different theme they're working with. And I think they really drew upon that idea for future big IP for kids. I will say the thing that pulled me away in my personal preferences now that I think back on it as you listen. the timeline you know turtles comes out into the 80s by 92 you got batman and x-men and then spider-man a little after that i think that's when my love affair with the older guard of comic book heroes pulled me away from the the colorful turtles and and i and i didn't look back once i fell in love with spider-man i was like i'm sorry leo you're your second you're your second tier to me now i'm sorry leo uh but yeah that's basically our history with the

turtles and if you want to learn more about the turtles i go to wikipedia or uh i don't know are turtles streaming anywhere can you watch those classic episodes oh the classics yeah i think because i believe so yeah okay okay i'm not sure where but i mean there's a lot of them there was like uh 10 seasons or something like that of what these games are based on that that series which that shows you how popular that series was not to get into animation history me and bob's other thing but uh you know if you got your 65 episodes, you were a strip show, meaning you could be five days a week

for 13 weeks with new episodes. That means you can air it four times in a year and boom, you've covered your syndication package. But if you made more than 65, then you had to be the biggest thing that was on because most companies just got like, well, yeah, we have our 65

episodes of Chippendale Rescue Rangers. We don't need more. But turtles went on for like more than double that length, I believe. Yeah, I think wherever you look in all of the, whatever media you look at during that time, Turtles is essentially either leading or is up there if it's not like far ahead of the pack. I mean, you know, as I started looking into this, so to jump ahead a little bit for Kalabunga collection, you know, we didn't just get behind the scenes materials from Konami.

I actually flew for a week out to the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, where they have, you know, this huge archive of stuff related to, just anything related to play, but like toy industry stuff as well and went through issues of a magazine called Play Things which is the magazine of the toy industry and was finding you know everybody was just talking about turtles during that time period and if you look at the like the top 10 list of toys

and things like that turtles figures were like you know either not only were like turtles figures always sort of leading as far as like the top selling toys but there were months where turtles the original turtles for the NES was the number one selling game in America, but not only that, it was the only individual video game that was even on the top 10 list. Like, you'd see, like, the NES action set that would count as, like, a toy, right? Or, like, you know, the NES power set was one toy on the top 10 toys. But then Teenage Mutantirtles,

NES, would appear on that list to be the only single video game. And I mean, apparently it sold worldwide four million copies, making it, like, the biggest selling third, third, party game on the NES, period. Like, big, we've now mentioned Dragon Quest twice. Like, like, bigger than Dragon Quest. It's crazy when you look at, like, how Turtles just dominated every medium that it went into. Yeah, that game launched at a really opportune time for the Turtles franchise, because I think

89 fall, that was the year that they had daily episodes. They were able to make enough. And if you look at the back of the original NES box, it says, like, oh, the, the four turtles from the comics are here in NES form or whatever. It's not even mentioning a cartoon because I think it's like, well, we're basing this on the entire idea of turtles right now. Well, on them on the cover of the game, it's the red mask and tail version of them, too, which is taken straight off of a variant comic book cover, which you can find in the

comic book cover section of the Kawabunga collection, so you can actually compare the two. So let's talk about the Kaabunga collection, Chris. How did this come... In depth. How did it come together at Digital Eclipse? And it should be noted that in the last 30-plus years, only a scant few of these games have been re-released. I can think of two offhand.

I can think of the original Konami NES game that was on virtual console for about six years or so. And then the arcade game was on Xbox Live for a bit. And I want to say Turtles in Time was on some disc... It got a remake, didn't it? There was a remake, but I think it was also on some disc Turtles game, like a GameCube game or like a PS2 game

or something like that I could just be a minute remembering but I believe you read it yeah essentially yeah so so just yeah essentially like bits and pieces here and there yeah never never any kind of cross platform big initiative so

I mean kind of what happened was and I'm speaking a little bit you know so my knowledge of what was sort of happening behind the scenes at Konami is that so Konami had put together the Contra and Castlevania and arcade the anniversary

collections that they did and there was just a very noticeable ground swell of people on the internet saying, we want turtles, where's turtles? Turtles was not as big in Japan as it was in the U.S. and in Europe. And so, you know, for Konami in Japan, maybe it wasn't on their radar as strongly as, you know, Contra, Castlevania, things like that. So now, but they, now they can see there's a very clear ground swell of support for turtles.

Okay, let's look at turtles. Well, you know, what, you know, it was kind of, like, what seven games should be put in this collection? So the contour of the Castlevania collections. And the response from the U.S. side, Charles Murakami, our producer at Konami in America, you know, was no, no, no, we've got to do all of it. And really the feeling was like, this is potentially the one shot to do it. If we're going to do it, it should be every game, because every game is somebody's favorite. Let's do this definitive collection. Because ultimately, you know, the stars kind of have to align to make something like

this possible. So let's, if we're going to do it once, let's do it the right way. And so what ends up happening is, you know, Konami, Japan is like, wow, Charles, you seem very passionate about this. Okay, you get to be the producer on it. So now it's, now it's handled through the America side with with the American team, you know, producing it at Konami. And so they're like, great, we want to go with digital eclipse. You know, we had worked with Konami on Yu-Gio games and stuff like that. So we were not unknown to each other. We really like, working with Konami USA. They like working with us. So we put together, you know, kind of working in tandem this pitch for all 13 games. And this is how we're going to make this essentially a more

more premium product, quite frankly, A, it's going to have, you know, a retail version or physical version rather. And so, so when I, it was very, very shortly after I joined the company that turtles, which had been, they have been talking about it for a long time, you know, and finally got greenlit, you know, all the negotiations, you know, Nickelodeon and everything at all kind of come together. It got greenlit. We did not start working on it right away. But then once that started to ramp up, I found myself not for the first time at Digital Eclipse with essentially like this, you know, blank slate of, well, like starting from zero, like what are we going to put in this? And so that's, that's how it all, that is how it all got started. What's that? Magistically cresting

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display armada. Yeah, you were mentioning turtles not being popular in Japan, despite that's where all of these games come from. I don't think it's apocryphal, Henry, you might know this. Didn't turtles take Evangelion's time slot after that show ended? The opposite way. The turtles aired.

There's people, some hardcore anime fans have shared online. The commercial of this was the, like, the last episode of turtles aired and then there's kind of a television promo from Japanese TV from the network saying that's the end of turtles everybody

great time see you later and then what's coming next week in the time slot and it is the trailer for the first episode of Evangelion which is yeah they people said like I'm stealing it from the people who tweeted me said like this is how they grew up like this is how they became teens in

Japan that whole generation no wonder that baton past shock people I mean unrelated anecdote but I must be told on the air somewhere. But Chris, like from the beginning, what did you want to include? What were you hoping to include in this collection as far as games, extras, anything along those lines? Well, at first it was like, you know, my feelings were let's make sure that, you know, starting from the basics, you know, I want to make sure that we have really nice scans of all the boxes and the games manuals. And actually, Charles at Konami was a huge help because even before this project,

and got greenlit he was like well i feel like we're going to be doing this so i'm going to go out and i'm going to build a collection of all the games uh all the u.s and japanese versions of the game so that we so that we're ready to go um and so once it got greenlit he was like okay i already have all the boxes and i already have all the manuals for both u.s and japanese versions like well that makes my job a whole heck of a lot easier um and then you know again it was more like well let me do this let me let me take this mission to the strong museum let me see what i can find there. And then let's ask Konami, you know, what they have. And we were kind of, the vibe from Konami was that they figured they did have some stuff, but that they weren't sure

what it was or how much there was or if they were going to be able to get to it. Because essentially there is this, as I came to find out, there is a building that is like in an undisclosed location. It's not in the Konami headquarters. It is a several hours train ride away from Konami headquarters located somewhere in Japan. And that is where the Konami archive is of all of this development materials because it does seem like Konami actually did at some point decide like we need to make a concerted effort to preserve this stuff and have this at a centralized location, which is great because as you know, I mean, not every game publisher decides that. and so it took a while for somebody to get in there only few people have access to it and um that like our producer at konami was not one of those people and so basically he was like on also it was like the height of COVID so he ended up like on FaceTime with somebody who was in the archive you know months and months later after we'd already kind of like gone to the strong and scanned stuff and found whatever else we were going to be able to put in um and uh they start

pulling out like binders and they're just like okay and like opening up this binder and it's all this absolute treasure trove of like pencil sketches and design documents for these games and they're going through with a phone they're like would any of this stuff be of interest to you and he's like all of it all of it get it all and then they're like okay and they pull down binder number two and they're like okay this is for tournament fighters and they show a binder that's like inches thick And so even in tournament fighters for the S&S, we have all of these original sketches of every frame of animation for all of the fighting, for all of the competitors, all their special moves and everything that were originally just sort of drawn in pencil on like animation paper. And we were able to scan all of that. It was just shy of a thousand pages of design documents were in the Konami Archive.

And it's all in every single page is in the game. And so when we got that, we had already executed on the plan for what if we get nothing. So the turtle's lair in the game is there's, I mean, there's the soundtracks, there's screenshots of the TV show, there's the covers of the comic books, including many, many variant covers, things like that. then there's the design documents in the boxes and the manuals and the advertisements i mean the strong had the first press release for the first turtles game and they had they had stuff that was that magazine playthings magazine they had like trade ads that were never seen by the public so all these ads all these graphics all this sort of behind the scene stuff it's all in the turtles layer and then there's actually um uh to to round it all out there's a search functionality where you can go and click on radio

buttons in the museum and you can actually do a search and say, I want to see every advertisement for a 16-bit game that features Raphael. And you can just sort of click those buttons and then the game will sort of build you a little custom gallery of every magazine ad for a game in the 16-bit generation in which Raphael's face shows up at some point. And you can do that for major characters. You can do that for minor enemies. You can do that for vehicles and things like that anything that had a proper noun essentially like if you like crang but you literally just want to see images of crang's two leg battle walker not the full android body but two leg battle walker like you can do that and you will be able to see um everything whether it's a page in a manual a design

document a reference to it somewhere and add whatever it'll just just that and that was a the laborious task that Charles and I took on of just going through a total of almost 2,000 individual images and stuff like that and just tagging all of them, which everything that appeared in there. But you do that work and you do that labor and then it just sort of becomes this, you know, it sort of becomes magic because when the player is interacting with it, they don't see all that sort of meticulous work that went into it. It's just sort of just a thing that just magically works, which is super cool. Yeah, when tinkering around

with all the bonus materials, I assume going into it, well, yeah, you know, box art and ads, I wasn't sure how deep it would go until I started looking into all the development material. To me, that's the most interesting stuff, especially, I loved looking at the design docs for the NES game, because

you can see just the concept on the page, but also the people drawing the turtles and the enemies are drawing them in a very, very cute style. So you have these nice little manga style illustrations of little turtles doing things, I found very, very adorable. But, yeah, I was shocked to see these items were preserved, and I'm happy Konami did preserve them.

And I also think there was a weird urban legend that, like, oh, that Ninja Turtles game was just some re-skinned other game. This definitively proved like, no, it wasn't. Here is a design doc from the beginning that shows the creation of this game from the very beginning. Yeah, and clearly, you know, they had thought about, you know, that Turtles won in the NES. they really thought about okay well what do they do they they live in the sewers okay well let's craft this game where the sewers connect places in new york city so you have to travel through the

sewers in order to get to this it was not yeah it was it was definitely not something that they um that they sort of like you know hacked into something uh preexisting for sure yeah and just looking through it and seeing like here's how for for the first ness game bob was mentioning like to see just the original drawing of like here's donatello's reach versus raphael Just seeing it drawn on the page by the designer, you know, 35, 36 years ago, or whatever, over 30 years ago is amazing to look at. Like, these are the kind of documents you don't, you don't often see. And even if, you know, they exist aren't always shared. So to see it there, yeah, it's amazing.

And then importantly, again, even just looking at some of these documents by themselves, even if you can't read what's on the page, because it's all some designers, you know, handwriting and in very tiny Japanese sometimes, you know, as you say, like some of these illustrations, they really went above and beyond drawing these adorable like turtle illustrations for the storyboards or the design parts of the documents. But then we actually went ahead and for most of the documents, the ones that really needed it, we translated them. And so you can turn on a layer that brings up a little floaty boxes around the document that show you actually what it says. not only in, you know, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, but then also we have boxes in Japanese because if you, sometimes it can be very difficult to stare at somebody's handwriting, but we can actually bring up the Japanese transcription as well,

which hopefully for our fans in Japan, they will appreciate that. Or if you want to use it for language learning, if you're looking at that, well, what does that say? Oh, I see, I see. What I also personally like seeing was you could also see the basis of all of the art from Turtles in Time, all of the sprite art. And I love that game because just like the Simpsons arcade game, game. Everything's a little off model in a fun way. And the very iconic sprite of a squish turtle is you can see the pencil drawing where that began. So I love seeing the roots of all

of these things that are now etched into my mind. Yeah, we set it on the Simpsons arcade podcast. We all did together. But yeah, this the kind of gag manga aesthetic that that came into those thing to come into both of those types of games from the great developers and artists back then to see on the original page how the actual like drawing for the gag. was made and then brought to life in in pixel form is just yeah it's it's magical really to look at it it's a that day i mean i will always remember that day when i opened up that zip file when it was like okay here's what we got and i opened the zip file and it's folders of stuff and just like randomly clicking on a folder and starting to look at stuff and just being like oh this is just

the first thing you open up it's like oh my god this is brilliant look at that it's hilarious and then to realize that there's so many more folders in this zip file and there's so much more stuff. It was it was quite a, it was quite a task just to like get it all organized. I mean, mostly it was organized because the binders had been organized, but like all the, for example, like all the Manhattan, oh no, all of the Turtles to the arcade game stuff was like in a folder marked Manhattan project. And so then once you start looking at everyone, it's like, oh, this is, oh, okay, well, this is actually Turtles 2, the Arcade game, or the NES Turtles to the Arcade game in Manhattan Project Poundl lumped together,

you know, and kind of like reorganizing stuff. And, you know, that was a, that was a fun project for my, for my brain to get to, like, you know, organize everything where it correctly went. And then kind of like categorize it, like, well, what do I call this stuff? How do I differentiate this from that, you know, so that the user could kind of like know what folder they're about to jump into and stuff like that. But yeah, like that was, that stuff is just so cool. I mean, for me, it was just like we were Konami and digital clips.

I mean, everybody was totally on board with this, we must publish all of this. You know, it was not about, not about picking and choosing in any way. It was like, this is our, again, this is the opportunity. Like, this is the opportunity to take this all and make it all public and let people access it and to hold stuff back, hold back for what, you know? What, you know, why, why not just leave it all out there at this moment? So we mentioned Turtles in Time, and one thing I was surprised and by, when I started up the arcade version, the attract mode still has the

pizza power excerpt from the coming out of our shells tour CD. They play a little bit of that song. And I was curious, I don't know if you have the answers for this, but were there any rights issues when it came to the many things involved with the turtles? Is that just all Nickelodeon's deal? Did they just have everything? They, no. So basically, yes. So pizza power, yes, we did have to go back and re-secure the rights to have that in there because it was, yeah, as you say, from the coming out of our shells tour, right? So, you know, to make sure we had that in there. The only thing is the original arcade game used a recording of the original Teenage

Mutiny's Turtle's, you know, cartoon theme song for which it was not available for us to license. So there is a, there's a sound alike in there. Okay, sure. I wasn't sure. I had an inkling that was like, oh, it's so close. I don't know if it's just a higher sound quality or what, but I know that when Digital Eclipse re-released the X-Men.

game over a decade ago they did have to re-record the voice clips but nobody really noticed and then if you compare them they did such a good job that they're just almost uh you know they're so they're so indistinct from each other yeah we tried we tried and we yeah we tried we tried hard uh yeah what i appreciate the turtles in time also still tells me to not do drugs yes that's very important to me yeah that that sessions is still letting us know uh no well also you know i wanted to uh also compliment you know you mentioned the comic scans of the comic covers i did really like that too because um i'm a comic nerd and though i never read uh the eastman and layered original run uh because that was too grown up for me as a kid but the teenage being ninja turtles adventures was

made for me as a kid then and i love those and just paging through it i was like i got to like the 40 through 50 section was where i read them over and over again just like looking at the covers like just number it flood flooding back to me like somewhere in my mom's garage is the signed copy I have of a teenage mutant turtles adventures 45 signed by the artist and just just seeing the scans there I was like oh that's so great like yeah yeah and it's really helpful because um I mean obviously it would be impossible to include the entirety of scanned comics but what we can do is again because that search feature is in there it um it allows you to compare and contrast you know what did this character look like in the comics what did they look like in the screenshots of the show what do they look like in the game it kind of like gives you all of the information you might need to answer some to answer questions like that and this collection contains uh you know 13 games and there are several several different platforms these games were originally intended for and i'm just curious uh were there any particular challenges into presenting these games in a way that is accurate to the way people remember how they look and sound and play it's not just you know uh eight

bit and 16 bit, but you have arcade in there as well and you have Game Boy. There's just so many things happening on this compilation. Everything presents its own challenges. I think the thing that people don't necessarily think about with the arcade game is that each player only can select from one turtle because what turtle you play on the arcade is based on where you're standing at the machine and what player you are. So there does have to be like an additional layer where each player gets to select their own turtle. So that has to be a change that you have to make, unless you just want everybody in a single-player game to have to play Leonardo. So that's like a, I mean, it's not like a challenge, but it is an extra layer of stuff that

has to be done for the arcade games. The arcade games as well, also, they punish you for standing around or they punish you for, actually, they even punish you for doing too good. If you keep, if you play the arcade game, you don't lose energy because you're playing so well, it will like just drop a bomb on you for doing too well. if you play without losing a life for long enough, basically, because it just needs to keep those quarters coming in. And so we leave that in there.

We leave that stuff in there for historical accuracy. But then each game has the enhancements menu before you started up. And for the arcade games, some of the enhancements that you can do are turning those things off. So the game no longer punishes you for either A, standing around doing nothing, or B, being too good at it. Another interesting thing that we found was so we wanted to make sure that we had the U.S. and the Japanese versions for every game. This is because we know the collection is going to be released in Japan.

It would feel weird to me to put something out in Japan and be like, oh, it's just the U.S. versions of these games that were made in Japan. So it's like we've got to make sure the Japanese versions are in there. You notice when you're in the menu screen and you press the change region button, If you tried this, you notice that it's not simply just giving you the Japanese versions. It actually changes in the UI in the menu screen, changes the art to the Japanese art. It changes the titles of the games to translations of what the titles were in Japan. So for example, like TM&T3 Radical Rescue on the Game Boy was called, it was called Turtles Kikiipats, which is like a close call. So like that's, we kind of translated it that way.

And so like, or like, you know, the original game was Gecki Kame Ninja Den, which translates to like Legend of the Extreme Ninja Turtles. So, you know, we wanted to, we just wanted to make sure that was in there so people understood like, yeah, like these games came out with different titles and different sort of like marketing around them. And then on the, for the NES versions of the games, for Turtles 2 and 3 on NES, the U.S. versions use the standard MMC3 mapper chip.

But the Japanese versions actually use chips called the VRC4. This was actually developed by and manufactured by Konami, because in Japan, you could manufacture your own games. So Konami manufactured their own games, their own chips. And so we get stuff running and, oops, like our internal engine doesn't support Konami's obscure Japan-only mapper chips. Because why would it? We've never released anything that would use them. And so this is where I am always the bearer of bad news and I have to go to, like, our engineers and say things like, so, you know, for historical accuracy,

like we've actually got to support these chips so we can run the Japanese version. And so we were able to integrate, you know, support for those chips. And so it's stuff like that. It's never like, it's never a, oh my God, how are we going to do this? It's always like, huh, didn't think that was going to be an issue. We'll have to do a work around. You know, so fortunately, I work with this incredible group of people at Digital Eclipse

that have been making video games since the days of the Game Boy. And so they have a lot of experience working with these, you know, vintage hardware and things like that. And somebody's always got a solution. Somebody's always, somebody's always figured it out. And I think that's a, you know, not to make this sound like an ad for my company, but I mean, I think that's a good reason to work with us because we have these experts who there are, these problems are always, the problems will always come up, but they are always surmountable because we have the people to do it. I'm actually not familiar with that chip, just the name of it offhand.

Is that for the sake of better music or graphics? No, it's a mapper chip essentially. So it's basically like all the mapper chips that are on the NES boards are essentially they let the NES do. Because the NES, like by itself, you have the PRG and the CHR, right? Like that's the N-Rom games. Like that's what it can do. It's got the program on this chip and character on this chip. And those are a certain size and you can't get any bigger than that.

But if you want to make them any bigger, if you want to make an NES game that's any bigger than Super. Mario Brothers, you have to start adding hardware because that has to start giving you more space for more graphics, more characters, and then more space on the program for a more elaborate computer program. And essentially, you have to have a mapper chip to kind of route all of that stuff, essentially, because the NES can't handle it internally. And so in Japan, companies started coming up with their own hardware designs. In the U.S., Nintendo was much more locked down on that, and they're like, no, no, no, we make the hardware. You guys don't make your own hardware. going to make all of that internally.

So when those games came to the U.S., they had to be reconfigured to use Nintendo's MMC3 mapper, which is similar. It's actually very similar in terms of what it does, in terms of like the extra capabilities that it adds, but because it's simply a different chip, it just

gets handled differently when you're talking about an emulator. Okay. Now, I was actually thinking of the MMC5 chip, which was the Castlevania 3 chip, which was a contemporary game with Ninja Turtles, the arcade game. Right, and I believe that if you look in the Japanese version of Castlevania 3, it uses custom Konami hardware, which is why those two games are actually different. Right, right.

Wow. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that kind of care in there, it also is just amazing to flip between the two box arts when hitting the region selector because, yes, you get to see that in a lot of cases, the Japanese covers are cuter than the, you know, the Angry Turtles with their white eyes. sometimes it's white ice sometimes it's not or but also then sometimes you get to see that the the sometimes especially in the japanese covers occasionally the turtles look more like their live action jim hinson company forms uh even like on uh tournament fighters but yeah just seeing though because for me growing up my favorite turtle cover was the arcade game on the nes like oh that's a great cover my big smiling colorful turtle friends right there with me i didn't realize it was also because of It was Japanese, it was the Japanese aesthetic meeting of anime back then, meeting the designs from the then animated series for kids in America. And I think you were tweeting about this, Chris.

I believe there's like a hidden watchman reference in that cover art. Yeah, I couldn't, I couldn't say for sure, obviously. Right, right, right. There is a, like, yeah, Michelangelo has a skateboard in that cover art and there's a smiley face in the skateboard. Okay. But then there's like some spray paint splatter on that smiley face that just, happens to be in the exact position that it would be if that was the uh the the the the the the watchman uh you know the watchman logo now of course this this information would be totally lost the time but

maybe whoever drew that might have been may have been inspired i don't know i feel looking at it now i can't believe i've never i'm watchman fan super fan and i've never noticed that before until looking at it right now i noticed it only because i have just been staring at all of these boxes for like a year and a half. You see this thing here? Could you tell me if it's good or good or not? Well, I'm going to need an hour. Yeah, at least.

Should I just wait over there or you want me to come? No, no. Talk it out with you guys? Yeah. Cool. Come on. Let's go. Podrid review.

We review things so you can do things. Every week on the HyperX podcast network. I'm Colette. And I'm at. It's time to talk about. the most important topic facing humanity. Climate change. Oh, okay, video games.

Every week on Colette and Matt have entered the chat. We have in-depth conversations about the games we are currently playing. We also talk to people who make video games as well as YouTubers, writers, and podcasters that you already know and love. We also talk about what you're playing when you join our community. Subscribe to Colette and Matt have entered the chat wherever you get your favorite podcasts. One of the feature I really love on the collection, Chris, is the fact that you basically can watch a long play of each game, but it's an interactive one in which you can skip through it,

but you can just jump into the game wherever you want to jump into in that entire long play. I want to know how those came together, and who is actually playing those portions? And they seem to always be playing as Leonardo. I think I noticed that when I was watching them. Yeah, so we, yes, so, okay, so how did this come together? We, this was something that, I think Frank Sefaldi spearhead,

headed this for SNK 40th because his thing was, look, you know, these games, especially when you're talking about like obscure old SNK games, right? You know, for some of these games, like, we need to present this in such a way that we're doing this historical presentation and to actually ask people to kind of wrap their heads around playing arcade games from the 1980s. It's really kind of almost doing a disservice because we should show people what it's like to play these games rather than force them to do it themselves. You know, it's all part of the historical presentation. You know, so it's almost like, you know,

the idea of like, if this game was on display in a museum, you could potentially like watch this playthrough. And so the way that this was, but then the exciting part is, as you say, you can just jump in whenever you want. So this was something that, you know, we loved and we want to feature this in our collections whenever possible. The watch and play mode.

You know, we had it in Blizzard Arcade Collection. as well. And so the, the designer's name, well, the guy who did the playthroughs, his name is Ted Church. He's awesome. We worked very closely together on that and on the tips and things like that that appear in the interactive strategy guide portion of Kaabunga Collection because he really made it his business to be like the in-house expert on the playthrus of all these games. And then, yeah, we made the decision that, you know, for consistency's sake, let's have it always be Leonardo just to have it consistent across the board so you know where you're jumping into

and then he made absolutely sure that each of these playthroughs he never took any damage which again it it got hairy you know with the arcade games because if you go too long without taking damage it makes you take damage so he kind of had to like figure out ways around that

so you never so basically yeah I mean you know through judicious use here of saving and loading because you know essentially when recording these watch mode playthroughs, you know, we can use save and load, and then we can also use rewind. So it's really, it's like, it's, it's sort of like a tool-assisted speed run, essentially, except it's, it's not, it's not a speed run. Like, it's not supposed to be a superhuman, you know, race through doing things that a human

couldn't, which is what a lot of TAS's tool-assist speed runs are. It is supposed to look like just a normal person playing through the game, but who just miraculously somehow never takes any damage whatsoever. And so that's kind of what it's supposed to be. And really, you can use, I mean, you can use this to just sit and watch the game being played through if you want, and that could be fun. Or, you know, you can use this as essentially fast forward, you know, because some of the games have level selects and whether or not the game initially had that as a secret

code, you know, for a lot of the games, we've included that as an enhancement. You can just pick your starting level. But this watch and play mode essentially allows you to start playing at any random sort of point in the game or any arbitrary point in the game. So if you want to practice one boss fight, just literally use this to fast forward to that boss fight and then just start playing right there. Fast forward to it, start playing, save the game right there. So I have a save right at the bottom. You know, you can essentially use this in whatever way you want to either to watch a playthrough without. having to play it or to really perfect your gameplay by having being able to just pick any arbitrary

point in time and just start there yeah i think the functionality is great but also the context that provides is really great because if you're a kid who didn't grow up with these games or if you're maybe even 30 and didn't grow up with these games uh you could play ninja turtles the the eight bit version and you can get to the underwater level and say well this is impossible but then you can watch a play through and say okay well here's the route i can take it's like how when i play a game now instead of going to GameFacts, I will look up a YouTube video of the part I'm stuck on and then watch someone else do it. And it feels like that's kind of the same thing at work here. Yeah, yeah.

So, I mean, it just, we really love it. It adds, yeah, I mean, it's just in this one feature, essentially, it adds so much richness and depth from so many different angles, as you say. Yeah, I'm so used to the rewind button, you know, I've played a lot of games like this that have a collections like this that have a rewind button. but to have a fast forward button that does, it's very novel, yeah. Yeah, and I mean, the rewind button, I think, is really clutch because, I mean, especially with something like Turtles 1, right?

I mean, let's, you know, cards on the table, right? You know, Ninch Turtles 1 for NES is considered to be the sort of like, legendarily difficult, maybe even unfairly so game, right? Well, you know, a lot of typically what happens with that game is you start playing it, and you're doing okay, you're doing fine, doing okay, and then, like, in two seconds, you're dead

because, like, you just sort of get nailed by enemy, he's coming at you from all sides or something hits you that you weren't anticipating or you hit the seaweed five times and you shrivel up and die in the water you know and it's just sort of like with rewind just the ability to just go back a few seconds and try it again just that feature um makes that game in particular so much more um playable and more forgiving and i think that people will start it's like there's so much that's good about that game i don't want to to throw the baby out with the bath water. You know what I mean? Because especially it's like now we've all looked at these design documents. We understand how much went into it, you know, how well kind of

crafted it was. The ability to just sort of rewind and try again, I just think it makes it so much more smooth to kind of go through and play it. And maybe for the first time, for a lot, even for people who had this game growing up, this might be the first time you ever finish it, you know, and really appreciate everything about it because we've given you the tools in the enhancements and the rewind and save and load and the strategy guide and stuff like that to actually

sort of tackle it on your own terms. Donatella never has to die because once he's out of the picture you can just reset your Nintendo. It's over. Now Chris, you mentioned the strategy guide. These are very cool additions to the Kyle Bunga collection because

every I mean these are accessible through the Turtles layer section but you can actually access these through the pause screen on any game where you folks have basically put together a magazine style spread of hints and tips and maps and stuff for each of these games and jokes too

and there's some great jokes in there and amazing original art that looks like it could belong in Nintendo Power or any magazine of that era so yeah huge huge shout out if we're shouting out people on the team Nathan Lombardi an amazing artist who is a digital

clips works out in Washington and he was just like I he understood the assignment I'm like Nintendo power aesthetic he's like yep I got it I got it and he just he cranks out these incredible pieces of art but yes look like they were just ripped right out of that that perfect like it's an English it has that perfect like it's an English language magazine that was laid out in Japan kind of vibe to it um nailed it in one um also norm Norm Norm Bidio, another one of our artists, did a lot of the magazine, the page layouts and stuff like that. Charles, actually, at Konami, Charles Murakami, was like, oh, like, I used to make, I used to write, you know, strategy guides and make maps out of screenshots so I know how to do it. So I'll make the maps.

We're like, wow. Okay, thanks, you know. So Charles made the maps, and then Norm took the maps and laid them out and drew the arrows and stuff like that. and just like the go-get-em attitude that everybody had to making this great was just fantastic. And so, yeah, we really, the strategy guide was like, it was borne out of this idea of like, okay, this is a, this is not simply a nostalgia play, but what do we do to kind of like contextualize this and talk about the era, you know, and what was it about playing these games? Like they all had, you know, some of them straight up just had the Konami code in them, right? Whereas some of them had variations on that.

But it was all about getting issues of video game magazines, going to the tips and tricks area to find to see if there are any codes or tricks or anything for these games, which they all had. And then also just, you know, the maps and the strategies and things like that. And sort of like having that external companion along with you while you were playing the game, maybe one of the. the siblings is playing while the other one has the strategy guide or the magazine open. And so I'm like, okay. And then additionally, we had the watch video technology, which was already part of the game. And so it was like, okay, great. Okay, so this is what we're going to do. We'll, we'll all, and then of course, you know, me joining as a journalist, you know, when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. And I'm like, I'm going to write my way out of this, you know?

And so it was, I'll just write a magazine. And that's what I know how to do. And so, it all kind of came together as, yes, the interactive strategy guide of, it looks like the pages have screenshots on them, but then many of those screenshots are actually videos. And the watch videos, the thing is, here's the thing, like, the watch videos, because you're playing as Leonardo and you're not, you're not doing, the watch videos are not about doing sneaky things. So, like, in Turtles 1, you know, the whole thing where you can beat rock steady just by hiding up on the crates and like stabbing downwards with Donatello's bow, that's not in the standard watch video so we can do a watch video that just shows that you know in the strategy guide um you if you just

watch the watch mode um for turtles two on the game boy the turtle never gets captured so you never have to play the or you never see the bonus the rescue game where if a turtle gets captured you can fight the rex one robot to try to get them back to try to get them out of jail um so then we can show that in the strategy guide and you can look at that to see a perfect strategy for that so that when you go in and when you inevitably get Cox, the game's really hard, you know, you understand a little bit more about what the strategy. So it's just it because, I mean, there's 13 games, they're all very different. We have straightforward action adventure. We have we have brawler. We have Metroidvania with Radical Rescue. We've got one-on-one fighting games. So every section of the strategy guide is going to be different and tailored to what the needs. of that game specifically are. And so it was a really fun challenge. It was super fun to do. And like, I'm glad that, again, then then also, you know, fill it up with ridiculous jokes as well

because, obviously, you know, just again, sort of trying to capture the, the ridiculous spirit of those 1990s publications, right? And so, you know, it's just trying to, trying for, like, it's authenticity, but, like, authentic but better, I think is the idea. Because the grammar is all correct. Yes, yeah. You really nailed the aesthetic and the time period. One thing that touched my old man heart is that when you go to the Turtles layer

and you go to the section where all the strategy guide pages are, the thing that represents it is basically a parody version of those red-border Nintendo Power strategy guides from 1990. Like that was the perfect, the perfect item to parody to represent all the work you did. Thank you, thank you. Again, everybody top to bottom understood the assignment. It was great. I didn't have to explain this to anybody. I also do love in the Turtles Layer going through the ads because, too, you can see in time how they start as these, you know, innocent late 80s ads that I knew them all because I was reading comic books at the same time and they were usually advertising the back comic books.

And you can see it transition into the play it loud era of ads. And they get a little more sharpness to them. That's just so cool to see all in one place. The ad I don't like is seeing the arcade game get to. slimed and turned to the NES game? I'm like, did they slime a real arcade game? Yeah, it's amazing. I hope not.

They may have. That might not have been. I mean, what's the cheapest way to do it? They've got an arcade game sitting around. You can buy a bunch of slime because it's the 80s. They just sell that. That's true. You know, yeah. Yeah.

I really, I also love the Japanese ads, which I was sort of discovering as I was doing this. And we didn't, I know we didn't get them all. And it would have been very difficult to try. track down all of them because, I mean, first of all, a lot of issues of these Japanese magazines are not scanned. And some of these magazines were weekly. And so it's like there's just a ton of magazines that we'd have to go through even just to locate where they would even be. But we got a lot of them. I dare say we got the majority, a solid majority of the ads. And some of them, God, there's an ad for, I believe it was Hyperstone Heist.

where, oh, yeah, because it was Hyperstone Heist, the Japanese version of a Return of the Shredder. And it's a combo ad for that and Castlevania Bloodlines, Vampire Kill. Because they both came out. They were both at the same time. So we have the full combo ad for both of those in there, meaning there's like a Castlevania reference buried in here. And it's a pun on Kame, which means turtle and Kamut, which means to bite as in a vampire biting you. That's the pun. That's the strap line. Brilliant. Brilliant ad. And then like the tournament fighters ads get like super dark in Japan. Like the ad is like there's like it's like four kanji characters like above the ad and it basically translates to like the blood boils while the flesh dances. And it's just like this wow, that is intense. It's great. I love them. I every time I discovered a new Japanese ad, I got very excited that we got to again, you know, put a. in there, and yeah.

I think the only thing missing, maybe you could patch it in later, Chris. I want an interview with the woman who played April O'Neill on the arcade cabinet. Because a little bit of a crush on her when I was seven. Let's track her down. but we're going to talk about the games very shortly we've got about half an hour left before we leave this like interview portion Chris was there any particular game you gained a greater appreciation for having done this collection something you might not have missed in the past

something you might have shrugged off in the past, any one of these particular games? Yes, I'll take this opportunity to apologize. I reviewed TMNT3, the Manhattan Project, when it originally came out. Now, of course, I was in sixth grade, so I reviewed it for my sixth grade class newspaper. But, you know, it was published. It was runoff on a Xerox machine. So I will take the, when I reviewed it, the Super Nintendo was already out, and I was 12. and that meant that anything that was less quality graphics than the Super Nintendo

was automatically bad because like, no, see, this is the new machine, this is good, and everything that's less quality graphics and this is bad. So I gave it a very bad review saying it looked ugly and, you know, whatever and why wouldn't you play the Super Nintendo instead sort of a thing. I recant, I take it back. I don't know if I can recall all of those issues that may be out there or not. I'm not really sure, but, you know, the Manhattan Project is an 8-bit masterpiece. It is absolutely, they took the engine of Turtles 2, and they're like, okay, let's make a completely

original game just for the 8-bit. And there's stuff in Manhattan Project, like with the character, I think it's dirtbag, like you're fighting dirtbag, and he, halfway through the fight, he walks into the background, and there's a pipe on the wall, you know, like a drain pipe, and he walks back there, and he rips off a section of the drain pipe and he comes at you with it and so for the second half of the boss battle he's got the drain pipe in his hand

now as a kid it's like oh that's cool as an adult it's like oh my god that's a completely separate set of sprites that's like a completely separate character that they put in this and this game has tons of levels and tons of animation it's like absolutely maxing out what the NES can do and doing these things that are very resource in

to just pull off a cool moment like the boss goes into the background and just tears off a section of pipe and just starts beating you in it. It's like, that's not anybody would have been called crazy for saying that they wanted to do that in an NES game. And there's just so many moments like that in Manhattan Project that just make it killer.

All the turtles have unique moves. There's a much larger set of moves that you can do. You know, it's closer to a modern day, you know, brawler than the arcade game was but because it kind of came out so late um not as many people got it uh and then um you know it's sort of a rare collective it's not that rare but it's like it's not like tournament fighters nes rare which is very rare but like it's still kind of pricey now so not a lot people have it not a lot of people played it so the answer the short answer you know is uh yes Manhattan project yeah i think a lot of people are going to be playing a lot of these games

for the first time i think that's one of them and that's one i can say uh i didn't overlook it and that's because I did not get a Super Nintendo until that Christmas so I was still playing NES games for an entire year but yeah when you go back to it you can see it as like oh yeah this is Konami in like basically one of the last viable years of the NES like using all

of their tricks and the soundtrack is great the graphics are great there are all these effects you've never seen before and I imagine a lot of people were like oh Turtles in Time is better or I'm playing my Super Nintendo this looks like garbage but now you can just see it as like one of the most finely crafted eight-bit games

Konami ever made. Yeah, no, the Manhattan Project is the one that filled me with the most regret, too, because my little brother and I, some of my favorite moments in gaming we ever had, was playing the arcade, too, on there, on NES. But when Manhattan Project came out, and I saw, I remember seeing those ads that you have in the, in the Turtles layer, and when I saw those ads, I, I could tell from the pictures, like, oh, it's an NES game. We're playing Genesis now, and I'd rather just play streets or age two or whatever like i just i completely overlooked it i wish i could go back and give myself the memories of going back to playing two player with my brother with that game with me as leo and him is mike and just having an awesome time and i i'm so sad i overlooked it as a graphical

snob of to skip in that game okay so we're all on the same page here yeah okay this this collection will allow you to play turtles games and get over long-standing regrets yeah yeah i Yes. Two promises. Look, nobody had, you know, if you, if you come to me and you tell me that you were a kid and you had all 13 of these games, I will be very impressed. I will be very impressed with how much money your parents had

because that's a lot of Turtles games to own. So for everybody, I'm hoping that there are going to be some games here that you've never played that you're going to get to experience for the first time. Only McCulley Colkin. And there's some that are very good at all 13. Only McCulley Colkin. Yeah, he's the only one that at all 13. So this is a good transition to talk about these individual games.

We're going to try to get through all 13 quickly. Let's go. But just like a few things about all of them, and maybe, Chris, you can talk about, like, enhancements. I did, like, play a little bit of all of these. So, of course, starting with the original into turtles for the NES. Again, yes, it's a difficult game. The rewind feature helps a lot. But what also helps is that you have options to turn off both flicker and slowdown,

which makes these games a lot more playable. Because when you play the originals, you realize, like, oh, the NES was kind of, of benching above its weight class in this or fighting above its weight class in this because it can only handle so many sprites but you guys are able to give it a little bit of a boost and make this run much smoother than it ever did. Yeah and my you know I mean and and this is something that uh again we we would absolutely want to do you know in collections like this because it is something it's possible in our engine it really improves the game for people but then I'm also the guy telling everybody okay but default has to be with the slowdown on like

you know the default experience you press the button to play it it should be as close to the original as absolutely possible and then and then making sure that everything is called an enhancement and then also it's like you know because it's the difference between we call it the enhancements menu it's not called like the options menu and these things don't default to on it default to the original historical item and then you can then optionally you know change it if you want to and there's always that restore to default button at the bottom that lets you take it back to where it was originally because for a lot of people there's some people who are really good at this game and all of their muscle memory is based around the slowdown everything they do is based around it feeling exactly like that but yeah

Turtles 1 I think there's a lot of things there's a lot of really interesting things about it that you know deserve to be appreciated in controversial opinion possibly I don't think the underwater level is that difficult I think it's all psychological I looked at a video that

when I was at one up we did a like a live stream back in like the justin dot tv days and i was able to beat the underwater level live having not played the game in like a decade uh under the pressure of a live audience so level three is very hard i think i think the damn level is achievable i that's yeah once you pass the once you actually do get through the underwater level um then you find out that like the the game is like just starting to get hard yes yes they're about to get a lot more difficult yet i i had childhood anxiety dreams about that underwater level. I don't think I ever got past it. It was it also wasn't as popular in our household. We owned the the second NES game. We rented the first one

because it wasn't one we could cycle through over and over again as a two player thing for me and my brother. It was more of a okay, you died as Leonardo trade to me and I'm going to play as Donatello or vice versa. Like it was really just we played it as until your term. die then it's that was the turn system between me and my brother and of course up next is the original arcade game this i think we can skip over because we've talked about it already a lot of people have talked about it it's legendary and this will likely be the first game a lot of people play when they start the collection but the good news is you can skip to levels you might not have seen in the past without having to fight through the earlier ones because of the level select so that's that's a nice additional future

there. And also, you don't have to like, you know, return cans to the supermarket all summer to collect enough quarters to be able to power your way through and beat the entire game on a vacation, which I may have done. God, the colors, I mean, yeah, just every time I play the first game, it's just the colors overwhelm me all over again. And I just remember feeling like seeing that opening, I was like, oh, it's the cartoon opening right here, even though as an adult you can see where they made changes to it to fit stuff in. Or same with just hearing a turrets, you know, say words like I it was yeah I was like wait this is the the game it can talk games can talk now we do sound like people describing the first talkies though we went through that error

ourselves I do want to highlight the NES adaptation of the arcade game because I think people consider it irrelevant now that the arcade game is so playable I think it's a very good NES game that I don't really consider a port it's them basically taking the idea of the arcade game and then building it from the ground up for the NES and And I remember playing this with friends at the time. Nobody was disappointed in this game. No one thought, well, the arcade game looks better or they talk in the arcade game, et cetera. Like, we realized, like, this was a very good game that could stand on its own.

And there's even more content than this one. In today's jaded times, it's fun to look back because, yes, when we got, it's like, yeah, we obviously knew that it did not look exactly like the arcade game. And that, in fact, it didn't look anything really, truly like the arcade game. But when we got it, it was like, it's the arcade game in our house, finally. And it was just this absolute just like losing our minds with how cool it was to have this in the house. It was so, and you're right. It's like it was, it was a, it was not a port of anything, but the feel. It was just the feel and the experience of what that game felt like.

It was almost just like a brilliant original interpretation of that, you know, to make it work on the console. And it was super good. Yeah, it was, it was all vibes, but it felt that way. Like, it just felt like I'm playing the arcade game now. And, you know, you don't have the arcade game in your home to be on a screen right next to you to compare it to. So when it's just on your home TV, you're like, no, this is the same. Like, this is close enough. And it says arcade on the cover.

And obviously, it's not four player, but who could play four players at once on an AES? That wouldn't happen. There's an adapter, but nobody has that. No, we did. But, but yeah, my brother and I played it so much. That was the one we played endlessly of like. Okay, it's the snow level. Remember that guy's popping out there that or we'd also like such a great gift to the developers of this game was that the foot soldiers are easily interchangeable with colors.

So you make the foot soldier sprite and then you can just adjust it for different abilities. Like we would call the boomerang guys the banana guys. Like a banana guy showed up. Get them. Get him. He's going to hit you now. Yeah. And were you fighting over the pizzas in the game.

Yes. No, my brother and I were not good at Sherry. Both of us would eat. If we got to the pizza first, you're S-O-L. Like, sorry, that's my, is my pizza. I'm at full health. It's mine now. There should have been a pizza sharing mechanic.

Go ahead, Chris. Well, I mean, as you know now, in the strategy guide, canonically now, there is the official who gets the pizza. Leonardo's pizza commandments are in there. That's great. Yes, I love that. And one, yeah, I mean, two, as well, I think I tried to sell it to my mom as well you know it does cost this because we own this one this was the one of the turtle one of two that we owned

and i think i did sell it to her of like it does come with a coupon mom so really you're saving money like this is less than than it seems you can feed a child yeah what me or say yeah it's like you can it's like oh we can go get a free personal pan pizza it's like no the reason i don't want to go to pizza Hutt with you kids, it's not because of the cost of the pizza. You get your parents to take you to Pizza Hut. There's always sort of begrudging, like, all right. So moving on here quickly through some other games. Fall of the Foot Clan, the first Game Boy game, this is just so evocative of what, like,

the first 18 months of the Game Boy were like and the kind of experiences you could have. And that is very built around the limitations of the Game Boy in its screen. Characters are very big. they don't animate very much because of blurriness on the screen. It's short, it's slow, it's easy, but it's all pretty solid. And I love how adorable all of the turtles look in this

game. They are just so cute. They're always smiling. And that's what I like about them. It really did a great job. And yes, for an early Game Boy game, they did a wonderful job drawing like big expressive sprites. You know, they definitely, yeah, it was absolutely designed in the sense of, well, people are going to play this on the go, right? Like, they're going to like take it on an airplane and play it for a few

minutes or something like that so like let's let's make let's put in a level select that's already sort of unlocked so you just pick what level you want to start in really it's designed you know having thought about this and now i've been like talking about it with people like it fall of the foot clan feels to me like a it's designed like a shooter like it feels like a konami shooter it's like oh you can oh you can kind of you can select what level you're going to start on you can use the conami code by pausing the game put in the conami code to refill your energy and just the way that it's just about like advancing letting the enemies come out taking care of them and then kind of advancing again just the pacing and the design of it the way that the enemies sort of like

appear on the sides of the screen everything about it like it almost feels like a almost like a shooter type design to me i think that's why i find it so appealing because nothing really feels like fall of the footclays it's very very interestingly designed game yeah i can see that the way the enemies kind of come at you and wave, especially from above, those little kind of fly robots, yeah. Yeah, and the fly robots, they come on and they hover there, and then they cut, then they attack you, like, give you, like, time to get ready for it. It's, it's very interesting.

Yeah, and with the, it works so well with the size of the sprites, because, you know, the Game Boy screen can only show so much. And if you're going to make a sprite so cute and big, then you really only have the space of, like, okay, there's space for the turtle, a foot clan guy on your left, to foot kind of guy on you're right and maybe some guys above you like little things flying around and so it's just about take two steps clear screen take two steps clear the screen or like it there's there is platforming but not that much comparatively yeah yeah yeah no i played this one

second most this was the only other one i owned and it was like my prized game boy game it was like i owned land super maria land tetris and this game this was the three i own for the start of the Boy for my early years of Game Boy and I play this all the time. I think the cuteness did really pull me in and just they're also like how cool they look even just throwing, throwing stars like they just look so cute in the sound effects too. Yeah. Oh, and the opening animation of just the sprites flying by again to my child brain. I was like this, I'm watching the cartoon right here.

This is the opening of the cartoon. I'm looking. Yeah, very good cinema scene arts. Yeah. I love that. Yeah, I played this one a bunch of friend headed on Game Boy, but I missed the other two Game Boy ones just because. these were not the kind of games I was playing on my Game Boy.

There's TMNT2 back from the sewers. I played a bit of this. To me, it feels like just they're kind of working on ideas for a fall of the foot clan sequel because it has a lot of the same like side-scrollery stuff. But then elements of the game are also a little more like the arcade game and that you can move like up and down instead of just side to side, especially during boss fights. Yeah.

So I mean, if turtles follow the foot clan was sort of like based around like what the perceived limitations of the Game Boy platform were. You know, then you see this evolution where they start transcending those limitations and finding out ways around them and building out. Yeah, so for Turtles, for Turtles 2, you can go vertical in these levels as well. And it almost, it just sort of like adding layers of complexity. And then, of course, with Radical Rescue, as I mentioned, it becomes a full-on Metroidvania with one very big interconnected platforming world that you have to explore and unlock new powers

in the form of rescuing more turtles, which will then let you traverse more areas as well. So that one, I think, is going to be a big surprise, people who haven't played that. And that's actually very... Turtles fall to footclan, I say, as a video game collector, like, Foot Clan is very easy to find. I think they sold a ton of them.

Back from the sewers, it's, like, significantly harder to find. Like, they didn't sell as many copies. And then Radical Rescue is, like, very, very expensive if you find a copy of that. Yeah, I think I never saw it in the wild. I might have not even known it existed until I did like a retronauts about the Turtles series

I think 11, 12 years ago or something like that where yeah I just didn't know about this game I didn't know how it played and I think the optional improvements you folks made to this make it very playable and I'm surprised you're able to rework the games in this way and that you are given like a Castlevania style map in this game of the maze

and little dots represent things you're supposed to find but you don't know what those dots signify well you guys have hacked the game optionally you can turn that on and new icons will appear to let you know what those dots represent. I don't know how you did that, but that gives the player so much more information that could help you play it in a more modern context.

You don't know how we did it, and quite frankly, buddy, neither do I. I know that Rich Whitehouse, who is our ROM engineer, essentially, is the one who goes into all of the original ROMs to essentially make the tweaks for these enhancements. And it's just funny, like, we just came up with all of this stuff that we could do by researching the games and just everybody sort of joined together to sort of write out a whole list of like here's all the

enhancements that would be really cool and I don't even know if there were any that were on there where Rich was like oh that's not really possible like most of it was just like oh yeah yeah I can do that and he's like alright here you it's like oh okay thank you it's just great to work with geniuses I don't know how they do it but they do it yeah like a fantastic idea to help improve that game

and I think a lot of people will be playing that for the first time yeah I do you want to move on, though, to turtles and time. I played the Ninja Turtles arcade game, the original one, at a lot of locations growing up. This arcade game was nowhere for me. So to me, this is always a Super Nintendo game. But you were on our Simpsons arcade game podcast, Chris, like we mentioned. It feels like this and the Simpsons are both Konami's definitive statement on the brawler.

Like, this is the most we can do. This is this genre perfected. And I love this game so much. There's so many ideas because of how often they can just jump to new different types of levels. there's a lot more humor in the sprites they're being a little looser with what they can do with the character designs and it's just a very, very pretty, pretty game.

Yeah, and then you can read, you know, one of the design documents is the original sort of concept document for the Super Nintendo version of Turtles in Time in which they talk about like, what is the concept for this game? It's like, oh, we're going to take the arcade game and we're going to bring it home

and, you know, we are going to add all of these features to essentially make it sort of like this sort of ultimate version of Turtles in Time. And so, yeah, clearly, I mean, the, you know, both, both versions are excellent and so many, so many great ideas packed into them. But you're right. I mean, even in this case, these are probably the two, this is the situation where like, these are the two games that are closest to each other as far as, as far as looks, right? As far as gameplay in this collection. But even so, they are quite different experiences.

Yeah, I mean, I had to read an article to teach myself, how are they different? there may be like 20% different from each other but there are still pretty important differences but I can't say if one is better than the other but the Super Nintendo one is the one that like I played the most with friends so that's the one I've had an affinity for right right no I mean it probably

you know it you probably could say that it was definitively better had it been four players but that would have been a little bit too much to ask of the Super Nintendo at that time absolutely yeah the collection especially with the multiple versions of Turtles in Time which I actually think I played the most in arcade and then for Genesis and Super NES we just rented it but more Genesis

but it's given me a chance to really appreciate like the humor like the comedic style of like just seeing like a foot soldier or walk out of somewhere you don't expect them to be like I'm just getting I mean just the the comedic sense of walking into a new screen and looking around of like where's the enemy popping out of it here Oh, is that car going to back out of me? Oh, no, it was from the window or whatever. Like, it just, that was part of the fun every time. Yeah, there's a certain friend I have, maybe a few friends,

where I can just say the name of a level in the same way they say it in the game and get a laugh. Like, Big Apple, 3am. Prehistoric Turtlesaurus. I can say them all. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's why it's perfect for me. But, yeah, Turtles in Time, like we said,

listen to our Talking Simpsons about this is Arcade. It's on that level. Like, Konami just, they perfected the brawler and I'm glad this is now available legally and digitally as well so we also have the Hyperstone heist because Sega Kids could not get Turtles in Time

I'm sure there were rights issues or maybe they could That's what I was thinking about when I said Genesis Turtles and I'm thinking of Hyperston Well you know they are very close to each other because this feels like it's built off of that foundation of course they can't make it the same game there are fewer levels but they're longer and no mode 7 effects

I think that was right around the time where yes like Nintendo still had like an exclusivity clause and so you saw publishers essentially trying to get around that basically by making something that was similar but ultimately

it couldn't be it couldn't be the same yeah I mean people rightfully complain about how some Genesis game sound Konami really knew how to make it work on the Genesis because this game has some great remixes of Turtles in Time

music like you don't think it's coming from the same machine that could produce music that was, you know, ear-singing in some games. So they knew how to work it well. And, yeah, this is really the first time I dug into it because it's like, well, that's a substitute for Turtles and Time. I don't want to play it. But no, it's a good game that stands on its own.

I think Turtles and Time is better, but they made the most of the situation they were given in which you can't just put Turtles and Time on the Genesis. Right now, it all works out for us because, you know, the Super NES Genesis console wars are over and we can simply enjoy both games in, you know, one convenient package. Yeah. Yes. Also on that topic, I also just love, in general, going through the, the ancillary stuff and seeing the Ultra Games logo again, just seeing that like, ah, it feels so cool just to see it. I do love Ultra Games.

And we'll wrap up with tournament fighters and an interesting time for the Turtles because Street Fighter 2 is out in arcades. The brawler, functionally dead in arcades, fighting games are a big deal, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, etc. So Konami does the logical thing and says, let's make a fighting game. And they make three different versions of it. And they're all distinct with, you know, different rosters. And there's also a Nintendo one for the NES. And that I think it could be possibly the only non-pirates fighting game on the NES. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, obviously there's some that had come out in other territories. But, I mean, yeah, if you were an NES player in the United States, only buying official games for your NES, that was the one and only, you know, one-on-one fighting game, kind of in the wake of, you know, Street Fighter, essentially, that came out on the 8-bit platform because I think that Capcom had looked at maybe even doing back in the day, like Street Fighter 1 for the NES that they had announced if it never did it. And so really, it was only Konami that decided to go ahead with that. and it was the final NES game that Konami released.

And it was kind of, it was deep into the 16, it was 94. It was very deep into the 16 bit era. And it was really when the 8-bit market was almost wound down. 94 was the last year for official Famicom and NES releases. And so to have it, just the fact that it exists is fascinating. It's, it is, and the other thing is that three games, they're all titled TMNT tournament fighters and they are all completely different games, not just like slightly different, but like completely different plots, totally different gameplay, totally different rosters of

characters. And so that even is another, you know, reason why like, you know, they're, they're all there. I mean, it's, it's just like a completely different experience depending on which one of those that you play. It taught me about the entire roster of characters that I forgot, like Ray Filet, the Stingray? Yes. I was like, who is this guy? Yeah, they had some deep cuts to fill out those games with individualized character rosters for sure, but they're all, yeah, you know, characters from the comics. That's, you know, it's funny. I do, I have the toys of Ray Filet, Mando Gecko, and Wingnut, so I knew them, but also

in the Teenage Mutiny Ninja Turtles Adventure Comics, they did a shocking thing where they actually, like, killed all of them. Like, they die in a comic and go to hell. They get freed, but. the comic ends with them dead it's a crazy thing they did again this was in the four kids comic like this wasn't in the eastman and lared one right no i love how i love how this whole episode has been like henry like well i didn't really have that many niche journal's toys and then kind of like as the episode goes on it's like well i guess i had mondo gecko and wing nut who didn't have wign nuts

and uh and i mean wingnots great i love wing nut i love wingnut and i really love you know again like back into the turtles layer section of this game go to the tournament fighter section start looking at all of the character animation frames um because they whoever the people that were drawing um these characters especially for s nes s tournament fighters they just they love drawing uh wing nut like there's so many like hilarious hilarious sketches of wingnut that are buried in this thing it's so great and and also in the tournament fighter games uh the 16 bit ones I love stylistically how they are capturing how the live action turtles look like they bring

especially like just seeing the turtle sprites and the drawings for the animation of the fights I was like wow they they went from drawing doing the pixel version of my favorite cartoony turtles to now these great looking pixel versions of the you know approximation of a big rubbery puppet you know yeah these these games are fun

if only to just look at all the sprite art and all the different animations just how meticulously they're crafted. But, I mean, I like these games, but they also fill me with a slight melancholy because having lived through this entire period, this is like the sense of childhood ending is sticking in around this time where it's like, yes, Ninja Turtles, the final movie comes out in 93. The cartoon starts winding down and I think like 94-95-ish, and it feels like, oh,

the turtles are gone now, and that was like only really four years of my childhood. I mean, technically they started in 87 for most kids, but 89 is when the Daily Show started happening and then this this these 13 games came out in four years basically four years and some change like just a short period of time for all of us as adults but as a kid it felt like like an eternity it felt like a decade practically so yeah when i reached these i'm like oh the turtles are going away but now for kids it's like they never left like for for new kids yeah yeah it's just that that time dilation is pretty crazy because again i was looking at you know he man and masters of the universe and uh you know uh looking at uh there's a there's a book that came out last year

with all the toys and everything like that. And it's just like, oh, my God, this incredibly short span of time just felt like, you know, two decades to me. Yeah, I think about it with kids today of like, say, I paid attention to Stephen Universe, the series, because I really enjoyed it from beginning to end, which was, I believe, 2013 to 2020 was when the final season of the final episode of the final season aired. And that seven years to me, you know, it felt like a chunk of time, but not that huge. but if you were, if you were eight when it started and 15 when it ended, like, that's, uh, it's an

possible event. You went through a lot. Yeah. That's, I, right. Yeah. Yeah. I wish my brother and I, we play tournament fighters a little bit, uh, at friends houses, but we didn't get it because again, for, from the same ethos of looking over, unfortunately,

Manhattan project, the same deal of like, what mortal combat's out now. And if we're going to ask our mom to get one thing, we're going to get this. And it made, you know, it made us overlook. these other fighters just because we we were on to the new hotness you know again you can finally get over your regrets yes not a guarantee i mean i just remember around this time like being interested in these games but also turtles were going away and i remember i saw all the original turtle movies in the theaters uh no autographs please uh but when i went to see three i thought it doesn't look good i don't want to see it but i feel like i owe it to the turtles to see this one so one of

the very few people watching that third movie which might be okay i haven't seen it in a very long time Here's an omission about Turtles, the third Turtles movie that I did. We made, I don't know why, but for some reason my brother and I, or maybe it was just me, decided that we saw the first Turtles movies once in the theater. We saw Secret of the U's twice in the theater. I could see what this is going. So we said to my mom, like, well, we have to see it three times. And we barely, I mean, even by the second time for me, I was like, I don't think I even liked it all that much. The third time I look it down

I was like we got to do this third time And I feel I feel again Talk about regrets I feel very bad I made my mom sit through Three times of watching that in the theater Oh gosh

Oh no You help keep New Line Cinema in business Henry Yeah It was a tough year for them But what a great collection of games Chris Very awesome work on this I'm looking forward

Everyone getting a chance to play this This episode will be live By the time the collection is live So let us know what you think In the comments But Chris anything else you want to plug? Do you want to talk about what you're doing online? Anything else

that's going on in your life? Oh, gosh. Yeah, well, I mean, obviously, like, kind of this is the, this is the big one. This game is finally getting out there and everybody's going to be playing it by the time this comes out. Yeah, you know, I'm just, I'm just existing, having a good time. That's fine.

I'm just excited, just excited for everybody to have this. Happy to have this conversation with you gentlemen. As always. Well, thank you for being on the show, Chris. and this has been an episode of Retronauts, by the way, in case you forgot. I've been your host, Bob Mackey, and of course, this is part of the HyperX Podcast Network. You can find us online at patreon.com slash Retronauts. If you sign up there for three bucks a month, you can hear all these episodes one week at a time in head-end free.

For five bucks a month, you can actually do the head of time and free thing, but also you can get two full-length bonus episodes every month. We've been doing this for about, I think, two and a half years now. So you've missed quite a few of our exclusive episodes if you are not on the $5 tier at Patreon.com. slash retronauts check it out that supports the show and it keeps us going and it gets you some cool stuff on top of that. Thank you for listening to this plug. Henry, what about you? Well, you can follow me on Twitter

at H-E-N-E-R-E-Y-G and of course, me and Bob do our own podcast together too on the Talking Simpsons Network. If you love all this nostalgia for cartoons have we got a podcast for you because we go through every episode of the Simpsons in chronological order right now.

We are ping-ponging between season three and season 13 at the same time and geez I guess it was two years ago now or a year close to it we did one about the Simpsons arcade game with Chris it was so much fun to go level

by level screen by screen in some cases through that game and the making of it and also you know we haven't actually done a Turtles episode yet we've left that one on touch for a while but we have so many great cartoons and animated movies we've talked about on

The What a Cartoon, Sister Podcast, and you can hear all of that. We get a time and ad free, as well as a ton of extras at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. Sign up there to get a monthly exclusive episode of us doing Talking Futurama and Talk King of the Hill of us covering those two shows, as well as a huge back catalog of us covering Mission Hill, The Critic, our favorite episodes of Batman the animated series, and lots and lots more. And also we do the What a Cartoon movie where we cover everything from A. Kira to A. Kira to a. goofy movie as I like to say check it all out at patreon dot com slash talking

Simpsons and thanks again for listening folks we'll see you again for another episode of Retronauts take care Thank you.