Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 230: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in 1989

Episode Date: July 1, 2019

Before the launch of the go-go '90s, a certain green foursome closed out the decade with a bang. Though the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles entered the comic book world in 1984 and debuted on television in 1987, 1989 belonged to the Turtles, with weekday cartoon episodes, a movie in the works, and, at long last, a chance to be the Ninja Turtles in both console and arcade forms. On this episode of Retronauts, join Bob Mackey, Henry Gilbert, and Ray Barnholt (check out his issue of SCROLL on the TMNT games) as the crew goes sewer surfin' through the tail-end of the Reagan Decade in search of Pizza Power.

This week on Retronauts, it's a flying saucer food delight. one, Bob Mackie, and today's topic is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in 1989. Why, 1989, you might ask? You just wait a second, Buster. Poles is here today with me. A doer of machines, Henry Gilbert. You want to admit that on the air, Henry?

No way. You said it. Who do you have on the line? Why, it's Ray Barnhold. It's Ray Barnhold. He's on Retronauts making his first remote appearance. Yeah, I mean, I'm only like 50 miles away from you guys, so. Are you currently, I forget, Ray, you're in San Jose, right? Not to doxia or anything on this podcast.

No, that's okay. I'm calling from... Well, I do my other podcast here, so let's call it the No More Wopper's Compound. Okay, cool. I'm having Ray on this podcast because back in 2012, I did a podcast about all of the Ninja Turtles games for One-Ups version of Retronauts,

and that included every game ever made up to that point. That was a lot to handle. That's a lot, yeah. But I didn't have to write many notes because Ray, his awesome magazine Scroll, Issue 7, was called Let's Kick Shell, and it was about every Ninja Turtle's game up to that point.

So, Ray, you did most of the work me on that episode, so thank you. But you were also on that episode, correct? I was, yes, and I forget all of it. So this is like, I also forget most of the magazine. So it's like I wrote notes for myself for today as well. But that episode, I'm sorry, that magazine is still available at scroll.vg. And it's a really, really good magazine. Starting at 199. Yes. Yes, it's very good. Worth every penny, I'd say. I have memories of printing out the PDF version of that at IGN's offices and making the entire office mad for tying up the coffee machine and I was not rehired back when it

closed down. You put the pieces together, everybody. Ray owes you then. Ray got me fine. No, Ray got me not hired back. Well, Ray, you're here to pay me back with a nice podcast appearance, so thank you. I want to put up my grand theory about Ninja Turtles because they've been around since officially 1984, but

in my estimation and from my own childhood memories and from just historical research, I think that 1989 was the year of the Ninja Turtles. And we are now 30 years away from 1989. So now I want to look back at the Ninja Turtles, what was happening

in their world in 1989, that included particular to our interests, the NES game and the arcade game, which were the first two official Ninja Turtles game. Yeah, I was a big, big turtle head. Like, it was perfect. Perfect timing. I was reflecting on

like our age recently about how, you know, I was like four when Transformers was big. So I was a little too young for that. same with He-Man, like those had both past their peak, though I still loved them, but I was watching their reruns

in G.I. Joe, too. The first one that really hit for me, as a seven-year-old in the seven-to-12 age bracket they want to sell toys to was Ninja Turtles, and I was ready to go, you know, balls deep on that Turtle's

tough the second they showed it to me. I remember vividly at the daycare I stayed at, well, it was more like the local babysitter in Arkansas in age 7, you know, glued to the television all day. The commercial came on for the

turtles coming up like it was like the Ninja Turtles are about to premiere. The new show, Ninja Turtles. The second I saw it was like, I have to know everything about this. I want every toy. This is the coolest thing I have ever seen and I need it all. Take me to the store now. But yeah, I had the same experience

where I am too young for things like you know, He-Man and Transformers and Thundercats. But when I was, you know, getting onto the internet as a teenager, that's what all the nostalgia was for. I was like, none of these jokes work on me. But this is the first show, the first super toyetic show that really hit me in my parents in the wallet just because of how marketable it was. And I want to say that, again, my theory is 1989 was the year of the Turtles.

It was the biggest year of the Turtles fad because 1990 was the Simpsons. The Simpsons Zone 1990, the Turtle's own 89. That's why you see so much crossover bootleg merchandise with Ninja Turtle Barts. And I guess Homer or Splinter, who knows? That's why the writers on The Simpsons thought Bart said Calabunga, because it was really, they got him confused with Michelangelo. They're basically the same character. Ray, how about you?

What is your experience like as a child, especially in this era with the Turtles? I really don't know. I was born in 83, so I'm kind of a similar situation. Don't really have any recollection of Transformers or anything. So I don't really, I don't remember what turned me on to Ninja Turtles. It could have been just a toy commercial or something. But, like, my favorite color is green, and I knew that early on.

So just seeing the turtles in general was pretty, you know, attractive to my young brain in that sense. You're like lots of green. I'm tuning in. Yeah, for sure. And I also, you know, speaking of the Simpsons, I didn't even catch the Simpsons until, like, 91 or so. And just because of our TV situation was dumb. But so I was, yeah, pretty much devoted to Ninja Turtle as, like, my main childhood consumer interest aside from game in general. So I want to talk a brief bit about the franchise general. At restaurants, we're kind of branching out in terms of covering nostalgic stuff.

So I do want to cover the franchise as a whole, like the Ninja Turtles as a whole, at least where it was up until 1989. So I wanted to give a brief overview of the series. And Ray, I believe you were telling me in the comments for the notes that you have read the entire run of the original comics. Most of them, the ones that I could get my hands on, yeah. The original, like, Mirage Comics run, yeah. I assume those are all readily available through digital versions and stuff?

Yeah, quote-unquote readily. I think, you know, there's some collections you can buy now, yeah. I don't know about the super later ones, like the early 2000s Peter Laird final run. Oh, right, yeah. But the black and white ones, I'm guessing, are the original ones. Yeah, but I mean, this whole story I really find heartwarming because I sort of knew the story of Ninja Turtles, but I didn't really know it until I dug into the research for the property as a whole. So the heartwarming thing about this is that it was a very self-made grassroots thing that exploded. So the turtles were created by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird.

There were two struggling comics creators united by their lack of success and their love of Jack Kirby. So they got together in the early 80s to basically do independent comics. And if you want to know how struggling they were, we all have seen the term Mirage Studios referring to their corporation that you stone the turtles. Now, I believe, Nickelodeon does or Viacom does. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, name a paramount, it's all the same corporate octopus, holding it all.

The Viacom Monolith. But it was called Mirage Studios because it wasn't really a studio. It was two desks in an apartment. Like, it was just them working out of a shared space. Hey, this is a studio here. We're in the Mirage recording studios right now. The Mirage, yeah. But so they were developing a comic called a fugitoid.

I guess it's about a fugitive robot, it seems. I don't know if that ever came out. I'm sorry, it's just the same character that ended up in the comic and toys and stuff. Oh, so there was a fugitoid in the actual show. Yeah, they basically adapted that character into the Turtles canon. Okay, I had no idea. At least in the comics, mostly, yeah. So they were working on this thing called fugitoid, and basically,

Kevin showed Peter a funny drawing of what would be Michelangelo, this dopey-looking turtle with basically nunchucks strapped to its arms. And by passing this drawing back and forth and developing the idea, they had one funny drawing of four different turtles, and they thought this could be a thing. Like this thing that started as a joke you wanted to show me to maybe cheer me up when we're both giant losers who can't sell an idea, this could be our new property. And it turns out they were right. That is wild that it all started as a joke like that.

I mean, the concept is so silly. I guess it really could. If you purposefully tried to think of it, you wouldn't end up with what you got, I think. It's just something that more comes out of, like, joking around with a friend. Yeah, I mean, the name is perfect for parody, which is why everything parieted it. Yeah, well, and all the things that tried to be Ninja Turtles after its success, a lot of them couldn't find the kind of natural feel to it because it was very committee-driven, you know? I guess the rule for all of the rip-offs where the title had to be equally

as convoluted, so you have like Biker Meister the Wild West Cowboys of Moosa Captain Simeon and the Space Monkeys. That's right. Street Sharks was a little too simple for me, so, but it is a rip-off. To the point, yeah, and there was, yeah, but even like in the comics, there's immediately a bunch of

parody comics with, like, rabbits and stuff. I don't remember all the names, but yeah, they were like very quickly lampooned even though it was kind of lampuni to begin with. It's true, yeah. So, I mean, Their story basically reminds me of Kevin Smith and Clerks where they just self-financed through borrowing and calling in every bet the first comic.

And through Word of Mouth, through putting out ads, they sold through two printings of that comic, and that's where they basically got the word of mouth to spread about this Ninja Turtle's idea. So they put all their money, they bet it all on black or whatever or on green in this case, and it did pay off. But that doesn't always work.

And they saw green instead of red, which was the color of their masks. This metaphor went too far. analogy rather so weirdly enough and I kind of knew a bit about this but I didn't know how close it was but weirdly enough Ninja Turtles

is an odd unofficial spinoff of Daredevil particularly the Frank Miller run of Daredevil because of course in Daredevil of that era he's fighting against the hands and his master was a stick right is right yeah stick was his trainer that was well Frank Miller

well he has a lot I could say about Frank Miller but he was an early webe When we were just twinkles in our mother's eyes, he was a web into not just Kirakurisal films, but also ninja films and samurai assassin, all that stuff. And also Lone Wolf and Cub, he was importing the Lone Wolf and Cub comics and took a ton of inspiration from that comic art-wise. And he popularized that. He was just a low-level artist who worked on, like, fill-in issues on Spider-Man or

Daredevil as well but Daredevil which was always like a D-list superhero in Marvel and always on like the edge of cancellation they just hand like Frank Miller's like I'm the artist but I could write this too give me a shot and so they handed it

to him and he got a chance with it and his big expansion was Daredevil before was just like Spider-Man if he was a lawyer and then the only way he got powers was radioactive goop hid his eyes and gave him super senses and according to the first Ninja Turtles book, that same

Goup rolled into the sewers and created the turtles. So turtles are an unofficial spinoff of Daredevil. I guess we should say ooze, not Goop. That's the official word. Mutagen. Yeah, that's it. Well, but anyway, just quickly with Frank Miller, because he was such a weeb, he was like, ninjas are magic.

So I'm going to create a magic group of ninjas called the hand that run the world and Daredevil will fight them. And it's revealed that Daredevil was trained by a previous blind master with sticks like he is, who made him a great ninja master. And so Daredevil went from being Spider-Man to a ninja who fights other ninjas. And that all seemed normal to me when I was a kid. When they made the Daredevil TV show on Netflix in the last

few years and they put the hand in it, that the fact that the only Japanese characters in the show are magical ninjas who run a corporation, that felt very racist now. It did. It, Didn't then. It feels like a product of the time it was created for sure. Very much so. Japan's taken over. We're afraid of them. So, yes, after the success of this first comic, they built enough hype for the comic to sell it through direct distribution, which I'm guessing is you sell a lot to what, like diamond and then they sprinkle it out throughout stores across America. I got a lot of comic knowledge here to share. What does that mean exactly, Henry?

Well, up to the late 70s, I believe, is when it started. It was always sold through newsstands. Like, all these comic sales would be done through newsstands. the newsstands would just say like, well, we know this book's popular. We'll order a dozen of this or whatever, and we'll just sell them. But direct markets were created for specialty comic book shops who didn't want to buy through the newsstand system. So the comic retailers, it honestly turned into a monopoly accidentally. But short version is they created a separate retail distribution channel that could be sent to comic shops so they don't have to deal with the newsstand unions. And, you can run the unions, eh? So it was DC, Marvel, and others would sell directly to them. But that also, as a bonus to it, it created an opportunity for a lot more independent creators to also sell their books through the direct market that they could never get into newsstands.

Like there was no access they could get. But through direct markets, they could. So that's a big reason why in the 80s, there was a huge increase in direct distribution independent comics. And Ninja Turtles is definitely a company that took advantage of that. Oh, yeah. And because of that, they were reprinting old comics. I think at the peak of Ninja Turtles in the 80s before the cartoon phenomenon, it was selling over 100,000 copies per issue, which compared to today's comics, that's basically what a popular comic issue will sell today. The most popular stuff Marvel or DC publishes will get 100K. Now, in the late 80s, the boom was starting to take off again. Like the highest selling comic of all time happened in like 92, and that's X-Men number one. That was like 5 million copies. And no. comic will ever beat that probably ever but yeah so right as someone who has read the original comics i mean

we were all too young when they came out can you like understand just why they were so appealing or why they caught fire i'm guessing it's because no one was doing that sort of idea um i don't know if i can fully answer that because the weird thing about the comics is that okay so mirage started like this first volume let's say and they and esmond and laird wrote and produced like you know I think like a handful of issues at first and then they broke big they got super popular and then all of a sudden

they didn't have time to make the comic by themselves so a whole lot of this first volume is just like them getting their friends to write and produce stories so you get a lot of like really interpretive Ninja Turtle stories that have nothing to do with the main plot that Eastman and Laird originally started

in the first few issues until like like the end or in the in spots and then they made like a second volume where they finally hunkered dead. and tried to make a whole cohesive story without a whole lot of the guest spots on it. I recall reading the early Ninja Turtle's kind of spotty and April O'Neill

kind of changes races back and forth. Oh, well, okay. In the final mirage run when Peter Laird was just doing it by himself, you find out, this is a big spoiler, but we find out that April O'Neill, if you think that's bad, April was basically,

he reveals that April was kind of immaculately conceived by like a magic pencil that her quote-unquote father found. And so he just like drew a baby and tried to, and then April was created. Wow. Huh.

I'm glad you spoiled this for me because I don't want to read that. Wow. I mean, it's an interesting concept on its own, sort of, but I don't know if it belongs in the Ninja Turtle story. Yeah, it feels a bit too metaphysical for the Ninja Turtle's world. Well, for most independent creators, this is the curse that happens. It happened to all the image guys like four years later after the Turtles craze. when Spawn or Youngblood got big

they are the artists and writers but also the people in charge of their company and when you have 800 meetings you have to have about your content you can't really draw anymore like it's making a comic is one of the like least most time consuming and least respected art forms you can do

like it'll take you way more time to do it than like to draw a storyboard for a movie and you'll get paid way more for that movie, then you will for your comic. You normally won't own anything. Yeah, also you won't own anything, which that's, Eastman and Laird got damn lucky. They didn't try to pitch this as a comic

to Marvel or something. They were very smart, I guess because they just couldn't get their foot in the door anywhere else. I guess by failing, they were able to create their own thing. If you don't know a guy, especially in the 80s, if you don't know somebody and if you don't suck up to a bunch of people like at San Diego Comic-Con and also move to New York, it's hard

to get in the world of Marvel and DC then. So, yeah, everybody wanted their hands on Ninja Turtles because they were a thing at the same time as things we talked about earlier. Like, He-Man and Transformers a lot of fun characters with weapons. Everybody wanted to license these characters. But understandably, Eastman and Laird were very protective of them

because historically, especially up to that point, we are pre-image comics when creators would own their own comic properties. Creators were getting screwed. I think this is just after the fact that the Superman creators got screwed was public knowledge, too. Yeah.

Yeah. For these guys their age, if they came up in the 70s, that was when it was getting more publicly known. Like, Jack Kirby was doing way more press about like, I created all these people. It's not Stanley. It was me. And biggest of all was in 77 or late 76 when they announced the making of a Superman movie. And meanwhile, the two creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, were destitute. That's when it became public knowledge of like, oh, this giant, mega movies being made at Superman? Did you know that these guys are starving? And that's when DC got guilted into basically signing them to a lifetime contract of the big sum of $20,000 a year. How nice for Superman. You're about to die. Here's a check. Yeah, exactly. But so, yes, most comic creators by the 80s were more aware of it, though they still wanted to play with the toys. It was more of the understanding, like Frank Miller, for example, he wanted to tell these stories about Daredevil or Batman, so he just did it. He got paid way better than guys in the

60s did for their comics, but he knew he wasn't keeping it. So they're very protective of this property that they created, and essentially they gave this one high-powered Hollywood agent 30 days to find them a licensing deal that would fit what they wanted to do. And I'm sure they read the contract like 30 times

before they signed anything because they're very protective. But basically this agent hooked them up with playmates who wanted to use the turtles as action figures, but they were like, well, number one, they are a little too rowdy, a little too, body there's drinking and violence in these comics and number two we don't believe in the strength of these characters based off of comic books alone well yeah you can't sell it off of that you have to have

a then you had to have a cartoon show i think even now if you don't have a tv show or something like i don't know how you sell toys to kids because they're not going to go into comic shops one of the least friendly places in the world for children is a comic book store and women and women pretty much anybody but old white guys yeah it's true we need a cartoon series to make this more profitable because that was the model at the time, especially, again, with the things you mentioned before. So they commissioned a five-episode mini-series for 1987, and that was, frankly, the best that series would ever look.

So good. It's just a well-done anime version of Turtles. Yeah, this came out recently that it was, like, Toe's A-team doing it, including, like, one of the top directors for Sailor Moon, who would later go on to direct and create a revolutionary girl, That's nuts. Yeah. That's why the turtles in that one look way better.

All the action looks way better. I love their beaks. They have actual beaks, which, yeah. I love that so much more than they're bulbous, like. Soft. Yeah. I guess in toys, they like that soft bulbous nose thing. But no, I want a little indent of a beak.

Just a line. They're turtles, for Christ's sake. So, yeah, I mean, the way the cartoon grew was kind of odd where, so 87, there was a five-episode miniseries. And by the way, I'm sure we'll do this for what a cartoon, our other podcasts, at some point in the future, probably soon because I've just been reading a lot about the turtles. So 87, we have a five-episode syndicated miniseries. I'm sure I never saw it. I'm not sure where it aired, but based on the strength of that alone, there was a 13-episode season for 88. That was for Saturday mornings, but it was syndicated. Meaning, if you were a TV station, you can buy the rights to that. It was not something that was airing on, you know, it could air on NBC, but it was a station that bought it independently. Yeah, I think that was when I first. Saw Turtles, it was for those 13 episodes

that first season because maybe it was 88, not 89. I didn't move my family left Arkansas in 90s, so I definitely remember it being there, but as I recall, it was, the first week was those five episodes

and then the next episode in it, I definitely thought like, this looks a little different, even then as a little baby, but I still just loved it. Well, I think you're thinking of 1989, Henry, because so 87, five episodes miniseries. 88 was 13 weeks across Saturday mornings.

89 was them making 47 new episodes so they would air every day for 13 weeks. So 89 was the year of the Turtles because that was the year. So they had two years of build up to the cartoon series, but in 89 it was full steam ahead. It was we have a new episode every day, every weekday for a certain number of weeks. Okay. That's when I was seeing it, yeah, which that's also, though, once you do a 47 episode order, that is when quality is going to drop a little. bit.

Yeah, it's hard to go back to clips. Actually, one of the most recent times I went to the cartoon art museum in SF, they had a Ninja Turtles exhibit, and it was hard to look at. Well, they also had commandments about violence, too, after that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, fucking Michelangelo just, Michelangelo just uses a grappling hook for most of the series after the first episodes, which, like, I bought a toy who has nunchucks.

Nunchucks are cool. Grappling hooks are boring. I mean, they're fighting nothing but robots, right? Yeah, but I mean, parents' groups were upset at the violence, blah, who cares? So, yeah, this backs up my theory about 89 being the year of the turtles. So first is the NES game in the summer, and then in the fall, there's the weekday cartoons, 65 episodes, and then before the year is out, there's the arcade game. So it's like the perfect distribution of turtle content for all the kids out there.

I was so into the merchandise and all the merch that, like, I think maybe this was the end of 90 or maybe even into 91, but they put out just a book that was photos of all the toys that they had made for all turtles merchandise. I remember flipping through that book all the time of like, oh, I wish I had that. It was a wish I had that one. It was, except my parents probably paid like 20 bucks for it, I bet. That's cool. God, all those toys. And not to say, I didn't have a lot of those turtle toys. boy, I had the blimp, I had the pizza shooter skateboard thing.

This was between me and my brother, but we were spoiled. And we had the van also had that one. And I'd say a good 30 of the action figures, too, I think. Wow. I mean, so I want to ask Ray. I'm sorry. You spoiled bastard. Well, I want to ask Ray, where did you fall into this world of turtle, the bridge tapestry of turtles in terms of partaking of the lifestyle, playing the games?

We'll talk about the game soon, but I want to know. I mean, it was an experience. Like, you could eat the cereal and the fruit pies and the mac and cheese and sleep in the bed sheets. No, they were custard pies. The custard pies with green custard filling. I can still taste the nasty cereal. Yeah, the pies is probably what contributed to my weight gain as a kid. I don't think my mom would buy me them because it just looked disgusting.

Oh, your mom was right. Your mom was right to not buy them. But, Ray, where did you fall into this whole, I mean, for a few years, it was just like the default thing that boys were into? yeah yeah yeah for sure i mean i freely consumed all of it basically uh you want to talk spoiled i think for one christmas i got like a life-size leonardo like plush thing whoa wow wow big as a child basically i did not have that uh i think that was that was that was that was the height of excess at least for me as far as the turtle stuff goes um yeah like i said i just watch as much of the cartoon as i could my oh yeah one the games yeah one christmas yeah one christi

Actually, sorry, there was a Christmas memory for me now of like that my mom got me and my brother all Christmas morning. We'll wrap them. It's all four of the turtles in their squishy, bendy, movie versions for the movie toy line. Like, oh, God, what a happy. You could probably buy like $300 versions of those now. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I will say that I wasn't a big action figure kid. Like, once I discovered video games at age five, it was just like, no, toys are trash. I will only play with video games. Had to be both for me. I just, I couldn't engage with that. action figures on that level. It's like I, I'm like Bart without an imagination. Just like the action figure. But I did get the Raphael action figure, just the standard default raft. And I think with my own money, I bought the Leonardo with, you open up a shell, there's all kinds of crazy crap inside, like weapons and status items. I don't know what else you had in there. But I didn't do a lot of toy buying, but I had two of the, oh yeah, and I had a rock steady too. Yeah. So I had three actual action figures at a time when I was never buying any of those. I love the original line of them because their sneer, like their sneer

mouth. And their dead eyes. They're dead eyes. And the random weapons they'd all come with on top of their regular weapons. And of course, the curse of having action figures like those is keeping track of all those weapons. Because if you lose them, it's a turtle without their weapons. As a fastidious little kid, I was like, everything needs to go back in the shell when I'm done playing with my one action figure. It was a lifestyle, a very short-lived one. The turtles would never die, by the way. Of course, you all know this listening. There's always new turtle stuff. There's new movies and video games and

experiences. But I remember the merchandising craze was so big that one of my friends was what you would call at that time a collector, except he took his things out of the case. But his bedroom was just like shelves and shelves of all the turtles figures. And he earned enough of the turtle points or whatever on the back of the boxes to get like the coveted Golden Leonardo. Good God. But I can't imagine he has this anymore. But it was there was almost too much merchandise. There was. There was. There was not just the Four Turtles, but there were variants on

them. And it's like, now Michelangelo's a clown. And it's like, now they're like evil creatures. I don't know. There's so many versions of them. My favorite of the alt versions I had was the I like the, it was basically Donnie in their outside costume, the trench coat costume. The pervert

costume. Yes, their pervert costume. Or the, well, I mean, in all their villains and friends got toys too, which all had little tricks and tips for them as well. Yeah, every one-note side character got a figure. Yeah, even Usagio Jimbo, who they don't even own the rights to, he got a toy. Was there a Myrna figure?

That's April O'Neill's mousy friend. Oh, man. You know, I don't think she did. Oh, Irma. Okay, yeah, Irma. I don't think she got a figure. Well, yeah, I think she did because they had like a tune line of the figures. Oh, okay.

More of the characters. How about Vernon? Is he out there? Yeah, yeah, I think so, too. I don't want that guy. So I want to talk about the games now. And Ray, you are our default expert on the games because you wrote about them seven years ago. But I did play through both of these for the show.

I did a lot of research more than I did probably on the old show because I was covering about 30 games on that old show. But the first game is simply called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It was released and I will say, let's just say May of 89, who knows. But May of 89 in the USA. First off, what is your experience with the game? Let's start with Henry. Like, were you there? Were you there in Maine?

I rented it as soon as I could and saw it. I mean, my mom gave us regular trips to the video store and me and my brother definitely rented. a lot of NES games. So I do believe we rented this before we would play the other game. And so, yeah, we, as soon as I could, I couldn't point to date on it, but it was a rental. And God was, I glad I was a rental because this, this was the classic childhood idea back then on NES of like, we didn't think the game was hard. Yeah, we didn't think the game was bad. We thought it was just too hard. And we're like, if only we were better at games, we could enjoy all these turtles. It was the old one good level.

trick to get you in the door. How about you, Ray? I don't think I ever owned the first one. I think I only rented it. But I think I'd heard, you know, first heard about it in Nintendo Power because it was a cover story. I believe it was Game with the Year Nintendo Power. That makes sense. It makes perfect sense. Oh, and the box art confused me as a child, too. That was the first time I'd seen all the red mask drawing in them. We will get into that. I want to talk about that. But for me, it was one of those games that I never had to buy, like Mario 3, because out of all, like the five to six Nintendo Freaks I knew as a kid.

They all had this game. Of course. This game sold like four million copies. It was a mega seller for a third-party game. Makes sense. It came at the exact right. The apotheosis

of times. Everything went perfect for it. Like an NES couldn't have been bigger. It came right when everybody wanted to play it. Like, yes, such smart timing. So this game, of course, is made by Konami under the disguise of

ultra games because of the whole Nintendo licensing thing, but I think it was just like Nintendo knew who Konami was. Nintendo knew Ultra Games wasn't a separate brand. But they were pals and so they, I mean soon they, but hey, they'd face the, they'd, they'd

have to pay in that lawsuit of giving people a gift certificate for Nintendo toys. Oh, that's true, yeah. I feel like also that Ultra was maybe treated as Konami kind of treated it as not their prestige line. Because you know, everything with the Konami logo on it is like Contra and Castlevania and stuff. And the Ultra

stuff is like skater die and ninja turtles which are like huge big and popular games but maybe not things that they were like wanting to actually put the kanami uh stamp on i don't know i've also felt i kind of agree with you ray i also felt that in the uh you know slightly more xenophobic 80s and 90s they are trying to distance themselves from japanese sounding words if they have a very american style game like with turtles or skating or skiing so ultra is different than konami and it's also good marketing yeah so yeah uh so kanami made the core NES version and like a lot of games at this time it got a lot of terrible ports to computers and other platforms so there's a terrible DOS port which is mostly known for an impossible jump

that's in the game that just like you can't do it unless you have the other version of the game wow you can't do it unless you have version 2.0 of the game that's insane that's that's illegal so yeah there are five other platforms like Atari ST and commodore 64 and amiga like all the all the European brands of course are called teenage hero mutant turtles yeah Yes, because ninjas are illegal in the UK. It's time for our minute of hate on the British people here. If you thought the Aladdin podcast was bad, you're going to hate me now. So this was released, actually re-released on the Wii Virtual Console in 2007

to promote the release of the CGI movie of the time. The same thing happened with the arcade game, which we'll talk about later. So in 2007, around the same time, there's a new CGI movie out. I'm sure they use some of the marketing budget to buy the license and, you know, redistribute the games. That was smart of Ubisoft to put that kind of money into. and also working with Konami to re-release these things when they had the license

like now, I feel like whoever's got the license now isn't cool like that. I don't know. No, no. And... Actually, they're putting out an arcade one-up, like mini-cabinet. You're right. Okay, I take that back. Yeah. Yeah, I did see that. It's somewhat affordable. Yeah. But yeah, so of course, you can't buy games on the Wii virtual console anymore,

but as of 2012, you couldn't buy this game anymore. So it was available for a good five years at the additional... with like, they bumped it up like 100 wee points because of the licensing. Ah, all right, yeah. So it was 600, which made it even harder to buy. So again, there's no real sales numbers because these things are hard to track,

but it's sold around $4 million. And to put that in perspective, the Legend of Zelda, the first game, sold around $6.5 million. So think about how many people played Zelda, about as many people played Ninja Turtles, give or take a few million. That sounds very believe.

It sounds crazy now, but as someone who lived through it, I knew more kids who played Ninja, Turtles then original Zelda, I think. Yeah, me too. I mean, too. I mean, a few of the kids would have Zelda mostly for their dads to play, but every kid had this game. In 88, when I finally touched

the first Zelda game, like, I was too stupid for it. I didn't get it. I knew how to play a game that was like Mario. I did not know how to play a game beyond that. It was a game I would kind of poke around it. The PAL version of this game was even a pack-in for Christmas of 90 in the UK. Allegedly that

people say that that saved the system there, because otherwise it would have been total Sega domination. Wow. So the British Nintendo fans our age were brought into it thanks to TMNT. Our TMHT.

TMHT, it just sounds bad. Yeah, I mean... Yeah, we get confirmation on that, but yeah. I guess Nintendo of Europe was not very happy about this because it was a third-party game, but I guess it worked because it was released a year later in European territory, so 90 was a new game

and it was being packaged with the NES in an area is where it wasn't doing very well. Yeah. But I will say that I feel like this is the last time I can talk about this game because it has been talked about a lot. I still feel like I have a little more to say about that that's new. But amongst people our age and slightly older, it shares a certain amount of infamy with being a difficult game.

And especially with the second stage where you're disarming bombs underwater. But I will posit that everything after that is a thousand times harder. Well, nobody beat that part to see that beyond it. Like, very few did. It's what sold game genies that game. It really did. I mean, I will say stage two of this game is a different kind of stage where you're going underwater. You have a time limit.

It's essentially about disarming like seven bombs before the time limit expires. It is doable if you memorize which bombs to get in which order. Memorization will not help you in any other part of this game. It's in painfully hard game that like Konami, did Konami get the mistaken message that this was a coin op? and they had to make this like really difficult to get money out of people? So my own take in this game is that the hardness or difficulty

is not intentional. It's just because of lack of design that's difficult. It's just like there's no real sense of design like there is in let's say a Castlevania where it's like these enemies and these ledges are intricately placed to push me through in a certain way

so I avoid these challenges in a certain way. It's like no. In most of the rooms in this game you enter a room and there's like 30 enemies just bouncing around. It reminds me of like a shitty game like Ghostbusters too. But I feel like, again, this feels like the last time I could talk about this game because we are all getting too old.

And this is no longer a common touchstone amongst gamers. You can't say, hey, those speeder bike levels, eh? On flattletoads. Like, a child would look at you and just throw their Fortnite game down and disgust. Now, what's making me feel all these days is like the, it's seen as old to remember Banjo Kizui. It's like, hey, remember our childhood Banjo Kizui? It's like, that's old to kids now. Oh, God.

but yeah when we got into the games press in like 2009 it was just such an easy thing like probably one out of every five articles I wrote mentioned this Ninja Turtles game

because like everybody knows this this is an easy entry in this top seven or whatever thankfully some children have avoided being scarred by it but we all experience this mutual pain and it's nice to have that touched on but again I feel like we're now losing it

and talking about this game will make us all sound too old so this is the last time on record I will ever talk about this game I'm lying, of course, but it's not a great game. I will say that, but I feel like there are other bad games on the NES that aren't trying nearly as hard. This is an ambitious game with a lot of different ideas, none of them really fully developed,

but each stage has like a central gimmick around it. There's an over-rolled section, sort of like Zelda 2, where you're going to dungeons. It's really Zelda 2. Yeah. I have to credit that observation to old co-worker mine, Hollander Cooper. He said, like, no, what you don't get about this game is that it's a lot of, it's Zelda, too. You go overworld and then you pop on something

and you drop down into a 2D section. Like, they totally learn from the adventures of Link, totally. Yeah, so again, there's stuff like an overworld, a vehicle, uh, swimming level, uh, stages where you're, you know, doing some, you know, doing some, kind of very minor stealth gameplay. There's something

happening new in every level, which means like somebody cared. I've played a lot of bad license games for the NSA that are just like, you're a shitty platformer, you run left to right. Like, let's say, Ghostbusters too. Or as a comic book fan, I would play anything that was

a Marvel character on it, but I play the X-Men game, the top-down X-Men game, or the Silver Surfer game, like, those games just suck. They're just not good. Unplayable, completely. Unplayable, made to not be played,

and with little care given, outside of music and Silver Surfer, I'll give it to Silver Surfer music. Other than that, though, nobody was trying. So, Ray, what was your experience with this game like in terms of playing because when I was a kid

this is one of those games like Battletoads where I was like okay this game to me has one level and I will play that one level that I like a million times but I can't get past level two

and that's it for me and then the rest of the game was a mystery until YouTube came out and there are let's plays and things like that. Yeah that sounds about right I only played a little bit of it back then and I was not always that great

at finishing games to begin with so I wasn't always that great but I did play through it when I did the magazine and I don't think I cheated too much but I just remember like well what you said earlier is that yeah it does get harder after that

after that dam and the bomb defusal and like at the pretty much at the end of the game there's like a gauntlet that you just can't get through without getting hit like at all like there's really no pro level strat to not get hit in that sequence and other sequences like that

so it's just a game where it probably just Wasn't properly play tested. Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, there's no time. They got to get it out. Yeah. Yeah.

I feel like even at this time in game development, there was the idea developing that in any video game, mathematically, you should be able to avoid a hit. You should be able to avoid every projectile if you can put in the inputs fast enough with this game. It's good balance. Yeah. It's just good design balance. And that's, you know, that's what I like about game design in general is that you have

just have to have some sort of balance. Like, you make it fair to some degree. But you're right. There's, like, one big gauntlet at the end of the game that just designed to strip you of all of your resources, but there are so many hits in this game you just can't avoid. There's a duck button in this game. You can duck, but you can't duck under most projectiles.

It doesn't make any sense to me. Well, and the way I played this game was always turtle games. Me and my brother played them together all the time. But the other game we're going to talk about, that was one we could play at the same time. But for this one with turtles, we instead had to have the rule of, like, my turn your turn my turn your turn and when a turtle would die then he plays the other one

and it was just the fight of who'd get to plays the good turtle and who gets stuck is the bad one at the end of it we can all say right now again it's his shared knowledge of people of our age group donatello this is this game is the donatello show donatello is the star of the show by design he has the best weapon with the most reach and each turtle beneath him has a successively less useful weapon so it goes donatello leonardo michelangelo raphael raphael raphael sucks in this game. He was always my favorite turtle, but he had this dumb spinning little salad fork in this game that hits nothing. But his little twirl

of it is cute. It's a good animation, I'll say that. Leo's always been my favorite, so I like that he's at least the beat. I mean, the sword can reach a little farther down. It's not as far as the bow stuff. But, I mean, yeah, it's, that's why his reach is just obscene

compared to every other turtle. And when you're surrounded by enemies, you want to say, hit someone below you before you can walk to an area, then you better freaking have Donatello to smash it below you. Michelangelo and Raphael are not stabbing beneath any platforms. But, I mean, it's one thing I like about this game that is not in other games because there are arcade games where in arcade games, by default, every character needs to be around the same level as other characters.

One can't be more of a power because everyone would play as them. But I think this game put into our minds, at least in the minds of my friend group, that in every game, Donatello is the most popular character, sorry, the most powerful character. Yeah, it has a very clear tier list. No, it upset me at the time, but I mean, as a kid who didn't grab their broomstick and pretend to be

Donatello? It was the most achievable turtle weapon around your house, but yeah, as a Raphael fan, I felt very, just they burned me on this one. So what I want to talk about is just like where this game fell into the turtle mania. So of course, this game,

the cartoon had existed for about two years in a smaller quantity, before this game came out. And so this game was May of 89. And by fall of 89, that is when the mega boom happened. That's when weekday episodes are happening. That's when the movie starts entering production.

Like, that's when Turtle Mania is happening. But this game is not at all faithful to the cartoon. In fact, it feels more faithful to just someone flipping through the comic book once, being like, uh,

that's a guy, that's a guy. Put him in there, put him in there. Yeah, even some of the toys, like it has, you know,

it has the van that is pretty much the, has it represented more in the toys and, cartoon, I guess. But yeah, it's just a weird kind of mishmash. It does feel odd. I feel like they put in just enough things to feel official. Like, okay, all four turtles are there. April O'Neil's there. Shredder is there.

The techno drum is there. The turtle van is there. But then just like, it's just like random, just grabbing video game enemies from other video games. Like floating eyeballs come in here. Jason, get your ass in here. Flaming Torch. You're in two. Come on. Well, Konami Simpsons had that same thing. Like, they, it came out

into the start of season two, but they had, at best, season one, like three episodes to go through, I think. I will say in Konami's favor, though, they used every part of the Buffalo

in terms of Simpsons Arcade. It's like everything we can mine from season one and part of two is going in this game. For this first game on the NES, they use very little of it. So my theory is that Konami didn't put a lot of work

behind this game because they didn't know what a phenomenon the turtles would be. So it was still, it was kind of blossoming before the weekday episodes hit in 89, but when this game was under development, it was sort of like, could this be a big deal? Who knows? Like, don't work too hard on this. Don't be too faithful to it. And I feel like that is why this game is the way it is. And why the arcade game released about six months later is like, you're just playing the cartoon. Like, these games are six months apart in time. There's no reason this should be that off. but it's well it's also a change in resources

too like clearly Konami gave a little more budget to their games after this one once they saw the sales in America and my other evidence

for this game being developed with the idea that like cartoon Shmartoon who cares about this property so the NES art uses the existing comic art

of the reprint of issue four which is why the characters are off model in terms of the way that we knew that yeah so they're all dressed with their identical red bandanas looking very angry, looking very angular, not the

soft, rounded, nice, friendly turtles that we see on the cover of the arcade game a year two later. It confused the hell out of me as a kid. It was the first time I ever saw it. I think it wasn't until I got that aforementioned catalog of turtle toys was when I finally saw the covers for the original comics and realized that's what the turtles really, quote unquote really look like. Yeah, and to be fair, it's a really cool illustration. I'm surprised no one stepped in and was like, no, the turtles look like this. This is the cartoon kids

are watching. This is just an illustration from the comic book. And even up until a certain point in time, for me as a kid, the fact that it was a comic book was just fun trivia. Like, did you know this was a comic book? And like, I'd be like, okay, I've never seen it before and I will never read it, but thanks. I never saw issues in this comic book when I was buying comics. You could. Oh, man, I want to mention, like, I got another Christmas present, I think, from an aunt. and it was like book three of the trade paperback of the comic and in like 1991 when I'm like seven years old it is impenetrable

yeah wow volume three yeah see I never read those because they were not readily available near me the only turtle comics I read were the Archie versions of them which was built it was post the cartoon so it was all based on the cartoon world I read those too yeah and it's very much like the Sonic Archie comics it starts to build its own universe very quickly and it becomes very involved fan fiction in a certain point.

Like it dangerous. Raphael got a sexy furry girlfriend in the comic for one thing. But again, I think all the difficulty in this game comes from the fact that it's just not designed. It's just no one sat down and looked at every square tile of a level

and thought, like, how would the player go through this way? How would the enemies flow through this way? Just usually like too many enemies on the screen at once, just sort of like swarming and bouncing around with no regard to you. And this game runs terribly. when I was playing it again

the UI was flickering insanely everything was slowing down just like too much was happening on the screen at once they weren't thinking about the screen by screen design as they would with a game like Castlevania which also Konami was working on at the time

I mean it really is an anomaly as far as like Konami NES game quality and that makes me think like maybe they just got maybe the team that made it was just really young like they were just just junior team members just handed something

yeah I can see that it could be I mean there are no real credits on this game of course and I couldn't find any credits all we know is who did the music for the game because apparently that's much easier to find out but yeah there are credits on the arcade game and I was able

to find a few names from there but this is an uncredited game which was the case of the time but not even like pseudonyms you know were credited that's crazy it's the case now for Konami well that's another issue entirely but again there are cool ideas Henry pointed out before when he was talking about playing

with his brother where you have four lives and, like, basically one life per turtle. And if a turtle dies, you can rescue them to get that life back. But again, it involves backtracking off into, like, very perilous areas. You'll just die. You'll probably just die with your next turtle, trying to save your other turtle. It was, I didn't even realize that was a mechanic until probably the third or fourth time we rented it, because that was when we finally saw, like, wait, oh, that's one of the guys that died before.

Can we save him? Or what are they doing in this sewer or whatever? Yeah, I don't think it puts it on your map or anything like that. I think you have to find them. So another reason this game feels unfinished, I call these bosses like of the Mr. Snubb variety. They're from someplace far away, where you'll go to the end of a level

or the end of a section of a sewer or whatever, and it'll start playing boss music. And then an enemy you fought a thousand times before will show up just with a health bar. Like, haven't I fought you a billion times? Like, no, no, someone else. I'm someone else. They didn't even design unique, but I mean, they did.

But they also use a ton of enemy stand-ins for bosses. That's lazy. They're just placeholders. Yeah. Or lazies, too, me. Ray pointed out a very good point that Konami games at this time were just on fire in terms of their design. Like, this feels very often.

Ray, you're saying this feels or at least has some things in common with an existing Japanese Konami game of the same era. Oh, yeah. So Getsu Fu Maiden was released on Famicom a little while before this. And it's not like a huge list of similarities, but it has a similar thing where it has an overworld. then side-trolling stages, and the player character kind of swings a sword in a similar manner that Leonardo does, and that's like the big things about it.

But then after that, they released the Ninja Turtles game in Japan and called it Gekikikame Ninja Den. So they didn't use the original Turtles logo, but yeah, they renamed it and used a logo that kind of resembled the Fuma Den logo. So it's kind of funny that they went like that. I think Konami kind of saw the similarities themselves and sort of made it like a spiritual and sequel. Yeah, yeah.

Maybe they thought of that game when designing this one, like, okay, the guy should jump a lot and use swords, but it's like, they're not that similar, but there's like an overworld

and level concept going on there too. Again, ninja stuff, similar sound effects and similar sounding music, but that was just Konami of that era. The good thing about this game and you'll hear this in the episode.

So the music is great. The music is really, really good. Konami music of this era was always very good. So we don't know who made the game, but who made the music is June Funahashi.

And they were credited on games with great soundtracks like Adventures of Bayou, Billy, Castlevania 3, Ski or Die, Mission Impossible, and Tiny Tune Adventures for the NES. All great sounding games. I love those songs, yeah. A lot of ultra games as well. Games ended up.

Yeah, yeah, I got to say, Ski or Die is a really good soundtrack. I swear to God, ski or die is an amazing soundtrack. When these were a lot of my favorites when I, when Napster began and I could download video game soundtracks that way, I definitely put these in my video game music. music files, for sure. On my Winamp. Ooh, Winamp. Which

skin did you use? The Evangelian skin? I had an Avangelian skin. Of course. I did, too. But yeah, I mean, all like seven songs from this game are in my brain to this day. I can just summon them at will because they're just so catchy. They're so great. I love them so much. And another funny thing is that

none of them are like based on the cartoon or anything. Like they're not familiar turtle songs or just all original tunes, basically. I think you hear a little bit of that when you win something. But that's it. They don't even reference

that in the beginning of the game. I mean, this game has an amazing opening cutscene, but in no way do they ever use that song during the opening cutscene. It's like an original song. But yeah, one thing I found

that broke recently was the fact that internally at Konami, the Turtles games were so successful that resources were being taken from other development groups to be spent on Turtles games. So there was like an internal competition

to outdo the Turtles games because they were just selling so well. And Castlevania was one of the series that was struggling. There was no Castlevania 4 on Famicom because they put resources towards turtles. I never knew that. I mean, it's easily their bestseller.

So yeah, you're going to take it away from Castlevania, but damn, those turtles. They can't... I had just forgotten, too, the two bits of trivia that other people probably know, but the yeah, the Ninja Turtles theme is written by Chuck Lorry. That's right. Two and a half men. He's the guy who does the spoken word points

in the spoken word lines in the song. That's a fact, Jack. And also, to set it in 1989, I'd forgotten. If you guys know the writer essayist, David Sedaris, in his most famous story, I'd say, Santa Land Diaries, there's a funny, which sets it in 1989. There is a tragic comic moment where he talks about how he's an elf working in Santa's workshop in Macy's in New York City. And he said, one of its times was, today a girl,

A little kid came up and said They wanted two things for Christmas Their father were back alive again And the Ninja Turtles toys These kids love their turtles You have to say in his voice Henry He wanted a Ninja Turtle Kids love their turtles

That actually that came from a Someone on Twitter He is he now drives a taxi for a living And I got to say Japanese taxi drivers are professionals Unlike the ones in America who always rip me off But he now drives a taxi And he was telling stories about Konami because it's funny, like, if you look at the people

who all direct games from this era, they're just don't do games anymore, or they didn't do it for much longer after this. It was just a job for a lot of people. That's pretty crazy to me. Well, because Nintendo people, like, they're the difference in most cases. Like, they're,

they were lifers at Nintendo. So many of the people there still, when Iwada did, his Wada asked for Game and Watch, most of those, like, guys had either retired or were entering retirement, but still were at Nintendo. Yeah, in the case of the arcade game, which we'll talk about soon.

So, number one, I can't find anyone who worked on this game, but I doubt any of them are at Konami anymore. And if they are, they're like in the spa dungeons or wherever they send their employees. But the guy who directed the arcade game didn't do anything else after that. And I was like, were these people just, like, resentful that these games sold so well and they're just probably paid a pittance and no royalties on top of that, to just get out of games because of that. That's just my conspiratorial brainworking.

But, I mean, they could have a different thought. thoughts about work than I do, of course, you know. But that's wild, though. Like, I would have, I would have just presumed that, you know, at least two or three of the main people in the Turtles games would have worked on, like, the Simpsons game, for instance. But, you know, I'm sure that's the case in some of them, but not the director.

I mean, that's crazy to me. Yeah. Yeah, so this guy who worked at Konami at the time, this is a translated quote from the website, Nintendo Soup. He says, during the Famicom era at Konami, the overseas sales for turtles was Konami's highest seller. And because of that, the Turtle's development team was prioritized above everything else. The Castlevania team and others like it, which didn't make a lot of money, had to survive on scraps.

There was a possibility for further Castlevania sequels on the Famicom, but it got pushed out by the popularity of Ninja Turtles. So we could have had more Castlevenias, dammit. Yeah, but hey, I wouldn't trade. I love the arcade game so much. I don't know if I'd trade a Castlevania for that. Yes. Well, let's talk about that. Fresh from the sewer.

And into your Nintendo Entertainment System comes Ultras version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Now you can take control of these heroes in a half shell as they nunchuck, swim, and Bazooka blasts their way through sewers and streets, ridding the world of rival robots, wretched ruffians, and the evil footclam forever. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, they're out of the sewers and available where Ultra Games are sold. So the arcade game, let's say, so arcade games at 89 did not have release dates, of course, but I was able to pin it down to November of 89. So that's roughly six months after the NES game. But I want to know for both of you guys, like where did you find this?

Let's start with Henry. Like, when did you first encounter this? Because you weren't reading about previews of arcade games. Like this just, like, struck you, right? Like a bolt of lightning, it really did. Like, I guess it would have been late 89 or early 90, but I think it was a movie theater or like on a vacation or something, because it wasn't in my local arcade.

but my family was walking through some place and I just saw the Ninja Turtles machine so of course just seeing the arcade art is so striking and just pulls you right in but I'm watching the screen and the free play and I'm hearing them talk and I'm like to my mind as a 7 year old

I thought this is a moving cartoon this is the cartoon right in front of me they're talking they're so colorful this looks nothing like that game I played on my NES this is amazing and I think I could talk a quarter out of my parents and it wasn't about money, it was about that they were probably going somewhere

like, we can't stand around and wait for you to play a game all day. But I played for one quarter and it was like a drug. And when the quarter ran out, I was like, no, I need more. But I couldn't, I never really played it and beat it until probably a year or two later when one birthday, my mom just gave us like $20. It was kind of a thing like on our birthday, birthday, me or my brother, we'd go to an arcade, we'd get $20 of tokens each, and we could just

play a game till we beat it. And one of the times was turtles. We did the same with X-Men and Simpsons as well. 20 bucks might get you through turtles. Yeah. You got through turtles on 20? I believe we did. So 40 bucks got you through. If we got, if we needed $5 more, she'd give it than to you. Like, if we're like, Mom, we're almost at the end. Please run to the arcade. And I, I feel so bad for that. Well, I mean, all of these, all of those games operated on the sunk cost fallacy. Like, I paid this much money. Why can I just beat it. But I did love, I loved it, and I love the

NES one even more. We'll talk about that one, too. So, Ray, how about you? When did you first encounter this game and did it knock you out like it did with Henry? I think several malls in America had Tilt Arcades. That was the name of them, and so did mine, and I remember seeing it in there one day. And yeah,

the same reaction as Henry, basically. Like, yeah, it was a moving cartoon. I could beat at this all day. And that's it in the nutshell. I think after that, it just became like an evergreen game. It showed up at every arcade after that

and it was always whenever I'd go to somebody's birthday party or something or some other get together with the kids, it'd always be like, yeah, let's do a four-player turtle's session. Hell yeah.

Yeah, this, I think this and Simpsons are the games I find everywhere. I think maybe even, they might have made more Simpsons because I see Simpsons in more places. Or they re-skinned Simpsons arcade machines that were Turtles machines.

It could be that too, which goes, even more into your 89 theory of Simpsons replacing Turtles. Oh, that's true. Maybe physically... I had a similar experience. I mean, these are all kind of the same, but again, it's like I was in the very beginning of my reading magazine stages of

video game fandom, but no one was reporting on arcade games. I'm sure if you were an arcade distributor or an arcade owner, you could probably get like a newsletter that will tell you what is coming out, but I did not have access to that. So, walking past the arcade in my mall called Fun and Games, I think it's now just a call center because nothing else is in my

mall. I saw it. I saw it's, and I was like, oh my God, it's a cartoon. I can play the cartoon. And of course, my mom and I had an understanding. It's just like, well, this is going to change my life, mom. You have to let me do this. And of course, now I'm recording a podcast for money about it, so I was right in the end. But I played it. I was just, I was marveling at it. I played arcade games before, but this is the best looking one that I had ever seen. And I remember I was just like jittering with excitement. It was like a drug, like you said, Henry. And I got home and I called my friend Adam. I was like, you have to get to the ball. They have an intro's game. I was like, hyperventilating.

But I remember calling my friend and being like, you have to, you have to play this. You have to play it. And then it's all I can think about until, of course, the NES game came out. And that's all I played with my friend Adam, who I called about the game way back in 1989, or in 1990, maybe. It brings people together. And also, I played it with my brother, too, a ton. Like, be the arcade one and the other one, too. And that's when we could finally pick our own favorite turtle and be them. His was Raff. Mine was Leo and we wouldn't have to just play his Donatello because he was easily the best. Yeah. So this game, so unlike the last game, which was an adaptation of just the idea of turtles in general, this game is just the cartoon. The logo is there. All the

characters look exactly like they do in the cartoon. All of the enemies look exactly like they do in the cartoon. The cutscenes are just stills look like they were ripped from the cartoon. It is just, you are looking at the cartoon. They knew exactly what they were doing. They pay for the goddamn song and the opening video, the attract screen. They paid for 10 seconds of that song. Sure, but they paid for it. Just to see that with watching the turtles fly out

like it kits with you the same excitement of watching the opening starts when you're like, I'm in for 30 minutes of amazing life right now. So when you see it start on the arcade machine too, you're like, well, I have to give you money. You're showing me the turtles. I mean, compared to how much

the Simpsons arcade game would fake the opening, you get very little of this opening fake, but it's just enough. It is the light coming out of the sewer and the turtle's exploding out of it and the sample of the song, but that is like the siren song to any child in 1989, like come and take, come and let me have your

quarters, please. If you're in, my local place is called Latin's Castle, if you just walk by and then you hear you're like, what, what? Like, you got to turn to it. Similar with the Simpsons opening, which I think they learned a lot from this game

and brought it to Simpsons. Oh, yeah. game. So yeah, they were very on brand in terms of being the cartoon. What I find odd is that the cabinet art is these weird, funky, live-action-y-looking turtles and a babe-alicious April O'Neill. Kanami, if you look at their arcade flyers from the era, they

love putting babes in them. So I think someone just like photographing babes, they made a part of the business. Usually in a beat-up tank top a lot of the time. Yeah. I bet whoever photographed April O'Neill was like, too many clothes on her. Oh, well, they tell me it's got to be this. But I remember as a little boy being like, she's cute or

whatever, whatever I would think about women at the time. But yes, a very formative brawler. I want to talk to Ray about this. I believe, Ray, did you put together our Konami Brawers episode for Retronauts away back in the day, like five years ago? I'll try to remember if it was exactly Konami one. I didn't have time to listen to that one again, but I was looking at, okay, what else did Konami do in 1989?

And to be fair, this is coming out at the very end of 89, but it looks so much better than anything else they had made up to that point for arcades, especially Crime Fighters, which was their previous brawler. It is so much better looking than Crime Fighters. Crime Fighters looks like an 86 game or maybe even like a late 85 game. This game is like a high mark in terms of arcade fidelity and graphics and presentation. Yeah, that's something I was going to say is that, yeah, there is a, you can, it's a clear generational mark with turtles and all the games before it. You can see everything like where Konami was actually learning and improving in success.

excessive beat-em-ups from that era. So, yeah, I mean, this is the clear generational mark. Like, yeah, okay, this is where things started to ramp up for them. And I will say, I'm not sure if there was a four-player brawler before, but this began, like, the escalation, like the Cold War of expanding the amount of controllers for arcade brawlers where this, and I will say, this is a very formative year for brawlers. Brawlers had maybe, I would say, at best, a six-year lifespan of being very relevant, like 89 to 95 maybe was the lifespan of brawlers being a big deal.

I mean, you could even say 89 to 92 after Street Fighter 2 came out. It was over. So I will say 89 is also another big game, Final Fight. So Final Fight and Ninja Turtles would define the brawler in arcades, period. Those were the days, man. Well, also because I see it all through the vision of playing games with my brother. And so brawlers would be one of the best games you could play. The other wouldn't monopolize the time.

You didn't have to share a life for trade-off like you did playing Mario. If you were playing Streets of Rage or a Turtles game with your brother, you're both playing at the same time. So no sharing, no fights. And you kind of even help each other at some time or steal each other's pizza. And what if you had more friends? I know it's crazy. No, don't have that.

Well, by high school, when the N64 came out, Then I had two other friends on top of my brother and could play a four-player game. But yeah, this escalation would continue for Konami where it's like if you thought four controllers was big, or four joysticks was big, what about six? And that was the X-Men arcade game with six joysticks, two monitors. It was just like the ultimate act of hubris. I guess it wasn't active hubris because they profited handsomely from it. Yeah, that was another spend all the money in the arcade to see the ending. Boy, you needed, I think it took us probably about 20 tokens just to be Magneto in that.

game. Oh yeah. Yeah. So this game again, released within a month or so a final fight. It's amazing how at this point in game development so much lateral thinking was happening between game developers. Just like they stumbled upon the same ideas and we're developing the same sorts of impressive hardware at the same time. So I can see them both being

major influencers in the brawler market. But again, a real showstopper, a real attention getter in the arcade. The spectacle, the presentation was one thing. But it starts off the arcade game, of course, with, I would say, the most visually impressive set piece of the game. you are in the burning apartment of April O'Neill.

Oh, yeah. It starts off with an amazing cutscene of all the turtles going through the window of her apartment. It is just, they knew to start. It's like, what is the most beautiful thing we can do that will draw people in? What is the one level most people will probably spend one quarter on, and that's it? Well, on the colors of it, just to just grab you because they are the bright colors of the cartoon, which you, an NES can't do and didn't do it on the TMNT game before this on NNES. Yeah.

So this was the color pal that you could only This was back then When arcades were better The idea of like arcade perfect port Was the dream And so seeing a You just expected a better thing in arcades But to get this much better

Was incredible It is still a very good looking game I will say it starts off with again The most visually interesting level A lot of this game And upon playing through it again I forgot a lot of this game There is a lot of repeated city street motifs levels

like two or three of those and I feel like turtles in time the next game would really spice things up in terms of level diversity in terms of how the turtles look because the turtles are all essentially kind of the same sprites with different weapons

and in turtles of time I think they were given like different colors like different shades of green they all play kind of the same they still look all very beautiful they gave Raff a different special attack because his puny little daggers

don't do the same cool swing that all the other turtles do so he does like a roll kind of attack yeah it was pretty cool move but that's kind of why I liked him because he had a unique a move to him. We all thought

that Donatello was the most popular or sorry, the most powerful turtle because of the NES game. So whenever I play the game, I think very rarely I would actually play as Donatella because that would always be taken up by somebody else. It was all about jump kicks for me. That was my strategy in it. I think it was

my brother who discovered it, a little brother who discovered it first. Like, no, jump kick everybody like then it does more damage. It was the coward's way out, but it's viable. Cowards survive. So in this game also, again, this is all about spectacle and presentation. So lots and lots of voices. Of course, none of them are the voices from the cartoon.

They're barely even close approximations of those voices. But the fact that our arcade machine was saying stuff to you in 89 was enough of a novelty to be like, whoa. He said, who put the lights out when he went in the sewer? Oh, man. And he said it again. And again. He'll keep saying it. But yeah, and Cowabunga, of course.

Yeah, wipe out. It was very interesting. Again, go back to our history of voice acting episode. It sounds very quaint, but the idea of a game even saying anything to you was just like, wow, what else is it going to say? Even when the Mousers made their just like noise, I was like, oh my God, the Mousers even talk. Whoa. There's a very creative use of enemy types. I feel like they're still brushing up against technology in this game and the amount of space they have to create.

So a lot of the artwork is reused in terms of, okay, the turtles are essentially all the same sprite. and in terms of the enemies they are kind of the same way too where the most common enemy you fight is the foot soldier but they come in a variety of different colors and they all different kinds of weapons so they're able to get a lot of mileage

out of one piece of artwork that they recolor and put different weapons in the hands of? I'd say they treat them a lot like a Power Ranger or Super Sentai villain like Puddy Patrol type of thing or it's just like yeah we'll give these guys all sorts of different

quote unquote personalities with their weapons and such no yeah we and my brother would go like oh the yellow one Ones are showing up now. Uh-oh, they're tough. Do this. The dynamite guy sucked. The guys of the big hammers are terrible, and the sword guys aren't very good.

But, yeah, I think there was kind of a lack of enemy variety in terms of types of enemies. I mean, there were lots of foot soldiers, but I believe the NES game, which we'll talk about soon, would add different kinds of enemies to the game, just to vary it up a bit. Yeah, the X-Men arcade game repeated this, too. Like, you fought, they created human-sized sentinels that were just different colors for each stage, too. That was mostly what you fought in the X-Men game. And I don't know if this game set the president. I'm sure it was there before, but this reminds me of the Simpsons game

in that the final, quote-unquote, level is two just money-sucking super bosses. So in Simpsons, you had Smithers and Mr. Burns just as the final level. And in this game, you have Crang and then shredders. So more than one shredder. Oh, yeah, the multi-shredders. God, that was a pain in the ass.

And it is just like a quarter-gobler. But again, you're talking about asking your mom for more money. The game is basically saying, you're going to give up now. Why not give me more money? You're going to see the credits. Oh, man, if you were to die and run out and continues now, you'll never see it. Boo, boy.

Then what, you're going to spend another $40 to get back here? That sounds like no fun. I'm glad that, you know, people complain about loop boxes now, but that probably some pretty evil shit back in our views. That was paid to play. So in case you don't know who made it, there are credits on this game, but again, it's the fact that these people didn't. do very much else. The director of this game, director

in quotes, he only worked on the X-Men arcade game and has no other credits. It's possible that was a pseudonym, and he was working under another name on different things, but that's all I could dig up on him. It sounds like X-Men similarities there. In Boss Fight, too, with

you like do Toad, then Magneto as well, yeah, very similar. And there are people who did music for this game, who did music for other Konami games up until the late 90s, so the people who worked on this game music-wise did music for, of where it's like Turtles in Time, but also for Melgear 2 on the MSX and Sukkoden 2.

So just some kind of like Konami music people were just doing music for the game. I think the version that we're most familiar with because we could take the arcade version home with the NES version. So there were seven ports of this game. All of them are bad, except for the NES version.

I really believe that Castlevania guy's statement about getting all the money to Turtle stuff because this game is a technical showcase. This game does... more than it needs to to sell the idea of playing the arcade game. It gives you more stuff than the arcade game. It gives you two new levels. I mean, this

is really where I experienced the arcade game the most was at home with this version. And as a kid playing it on the TV, I didn't have the two things next to each other because I can fool myself into thinking, you know, it's essentially the same thing. And it's alarming to see how close they kind of come, given the technology they have. Do you guys remember the comic

book ad that was the I think it was for the Tiger version but it was ooze dripping on the arcade machine that then shrunk in the tiger version. No, it's for the NES one, yeah. Oh, okay, okay. Come to the NES box, basically. Yeah, that's what I love,

that I think that ad really sold it to me that I thought I misremembered this Tiger version. Yeah, that, when I saw that ad, I was like, I can play at home, like, and this one, we did own. We rented the other TMNT one, but this was a birthday gift for one of us. Yes, so they cut down on a few things. course, like the amount of enemies on screen, of course. It's a very inferior-looking game because

it's running on 8-bit hardware. But what they do add is so you can play with two players. So the first Turtles game had not any simultaneous player game action. And also, what's added in this version are two new bosses designed by Kevin Eastman and two new levels to put them in. So what I like about this game is that Konami had a thing for putting very Japanese stages in non-Japanese licenses. So the three I can think of is Simpsons, Lone Ranger, and this. all have very Japanese stages with Japanese bosses in them just for fun. Yeah, but not a kabuki play

like in Simpson. No, sorry, right, you're saying? I was just saying, I was just joking, and then Konami only released like three Goimmon games here. Yeah, what the hell? But yeah, so that's one thing I like where it's just like they managed to find a way to sneak in a Japanese level, a Japanese style level, although

Kevin Eastman did design a samurai-style boss with like a floating head. I didn't know that, and I think I might have made an error in that in the magazine actually. I think I just called them Konami creations or something. You'll have to recall that one, Ray. I'm sorry.

I want a refund, damn it. Let me go back and open up that project file from six years ago. So one thing they change, it's actually an improvement. So in one of the stages in the arcade game, the boss is you fighting rock steady and bebop together. Which was pretty cool. It was cool, but you fought those bosses previously.

And the NES version, because they can't they can't fit two huge boss characters on the screen at the same time, you fight Baxter Stockman as a fly, which you never fought him as a fly in the arcade game. You just fought him in his dumb, dorky, flying machine kind of thing. When I played it as a kid, I noticed the difference is, and I was definitely sad they

didn't talk to me, but I understood there was more, and I did appreciate that. Like, okay, but there is more in this game. I'm playing this for longer, and I'm not putting quarters in. I just keep playing and playing and playing. And there was also a lot of

Pizza Hut product placements. Oh, man. Yes, so Pizza Hut is all over this game, at least the initial run of it. I believe they took that stuff out for the virtual console version, yeah, but hey, pizza needs to pay up. So, this cart came with a coupon for a free personal pan pizza. I pop

my peas here, which was good up until December 31st of 1991, so no, you can't use it if you buy this game mint and box. That's okay. I didn't even like pizza that much, because for one thing, it was on like the other side of town, so I never really went there. I had much preferred roundtable

pizza, which is much more expensive, but better quality. I will say that for me at least, and I'm sure it might have been the same for you guys, like the Pizza Hut personal pan pizza was the definitive food-based reward system for most child accomplishments. Like, you write a book, get a pizza.

You bought a game, get a pizza. Yeah. They expertly marketed it as their happy meal. Like, I definitely got more happy meals, but the idea was your parents would take you to the dine-in restaurant version of Pizza Hut, which certainly doesn't exist anymore. You get those amazing red plastic cups.

A picture of Pepsi. Picture of Pepsi. And you would want to, I mean, I remember doing it for Garfield cups. I remember doing it for laying before time hand puppet things. Back to the future glasses. Yeah, back to future glasses too. And they had an X-Men thing. Like, it was cups and a placemat.

You wouldn't get a toy, which I did think was dumb. But, yeah, the personal pan pizza was like, that's a dream like and they sold it to kids like the marketing was really smart because they're like you don't want to share pizza with your dumb mom or your sister get get your own by too i'm not sharing with kately this is your personal pizza for you get what you want on it which would just be cheese because i was a boring baby kid but i just wanted to cheese pizza they knew it was a way to offload cheese pizzas yeah onto kids with baby palettes with like a nickel of dough on it's like yeah but the personal pan, like the ownership you had over it.

And so you could also pitch it to your, I swear like I must have pitched to my mom. Like, well, have you bought it for us? It also gets a free pizza. So it's almost like it's paying for itself, you know? You mean that'll buy me a $6 pizza, this $50 game? And now it's very crass when that Pizza Hut logo appears on screen. But as a kid, I was like, it's Pizza Hut.

Like the thing I eat. It made me want Pizza Hut more. So in a way, it's evil. Oh, yeah. But I don't know why, but it's like, I know, Pizza Hut is the pizza the Turtles prefer, and therefore, it is my favorite pizza. See, in the first movie, they got Domino's, but then Pizza Hut paid them, like, when they filmed the movie, they got dominoes, but then as they got bigger and bigger, Pizza Hut took over the sponsorship. That's why they eat friggin, in the Michael Bay turtles, they still eat Pizza Hut, because they paid the big money. As it should be. Yeah, I mean, we're coming up at the end of the podcast, and it should be said at this point, we're only,

only covering up to 89. There is like 30 more years of Turtles stuff happening after this. In most recent memory, I believe a new Turtles cartoon just started that is sort of like Teen Titans Goy. It looks really neat. It looks kind of cool.

And there were the recent Michael Bay disaster movies and that they were about disasters and also disasters. But I will say, so much has happened in the past 30 years. We're only up to 89. We can easily do more and we will. But Ray, you wrote the book

on Ninja Turtle's games. What is your take? on the Konami games to follow the ones we talked about today? Well, obviously, right after this was Turtles and Time in the arcade. And I think everybody sort of interprets that as like the peak of the, I guess the Turtles franchise as games and for Konami as far as like treating those games. So that's a big one. I do like, the Game Boy ones are okay.

The third one is interesting. It's kind of a Metroidvania. That first Gameboy game, that was like the second game. After your Mario Land and Tetris. That was the third Game Boy game I got, and I played the crap out of that game. I love that game, yeah. You mentioned Turtles in Time, Ray, not to interrupt,

but I was just playing that at Quarterworld. No, I'm sorry, ground control in Portland. It's there, and I played every time. And I never watched the track screen before recently, and I found out that Splinter is 30. What? So there you have it. And rat years, that's pretty old.

Sure, sure. I'm sorry, right, please continue. Yeah, I would say, well, first of all, TMNT2 on NES, it is an air. admirable effort. It surely is. It seems, it kind of feels like more of a profit-driven decision, though, because for a 91 release, like, they could have made it like the killer app for the Super NES, but that surprises me, yeah. So it makes sense for them to just port it to that. But yeah, that's really the only comment I had about that game, basically. Yeah, like I said, oh, also

tournament fighters on Super NES is very well regarded. There's like, kind of like a fighting game scene, for it because people made like a champion edition hack of it. So people play that on side tournaments and things. You can find streams of it. Yeah, it's a fun game. I really like tournament fighters on Super Nias. It has kind of a neo-geo quality

that they really nailed. Not so much with the other tournament fighters games. Those are a bit lesser, but so it goes. And I think the Turtles games ended in 96-97 with Konami or before that, because 96 was the end of the cartoon, the first cartoon. No, you ended

before the cartoon, they kind of ended after tournament fighters. I would think by then, the weed aged out of it and the next generation had, they had new things. They like, the Power Rangers really ate the Turtles lunch. That's true. I think 93, it was the passing

of the torch from Turtles to Power Rangers. Absolutely. In terms of kids' action cartoons. But, yeah, I hope everyone enjoyed this look at two interesting games. I'm glad I didn't do every Turtle's game like I did in that first podcast, which I bet was just an hour long. God help me. I must have had more energy or something

because I feel like, wow, there's still more to talk about these two games, but we're out of time for now. But thank you so much for joining us remotely, Ray. I really appreciate it. Absolutely. Can you please plug what you're doing, of course? People can still buy scroll,

although that one issue has a mistake in it. I will not let you promote it. I'm sorry. No, it's a great issue outside of that. Definitely not the first mistake. Yeah, it's scroll.vg. You can find it. There's a very clear shop link.

You can just find all the magazines there. You can get it as a PDF or an ebook, whatever you want, or print. But yeah, so moved on from the magazine. I started just making games as my company, Bipeladled Dog, and that you can just find out at Bipelot.org. I try to buy the most creative top-level domains I can. You can play my game, BlastRushers on iOS and Android.

And like I mentioned at the top of the show, I also do another podcast with my friend Alex called No More Whoppers. We do it very infrequently, but we just goof around on it. It's one of those shows. But you can check that out at no more whoppers. Oh, yeah, Tumblr.com. We're still on Tumblr. How about that?

You haven't given up yet. If you stay, you could be the only one left. Yeah, we might be. It's just a feed for our other feeds. You don't have pornography on there, so you're going to be there for a while. Not yet. Thank you for joining us, Ray. So thanks again to Ray Barnhold for being on the show.

We always love having Ray on, and please check out Scroll at scroll. Atcg. He's not making the magazines anymore, for now at least, but they were a great collection, and I used that first into Turtles magazine as a guide for the first podcast and Ray was very good on this podcast as well so please check out his stuff if you want to help our show though please go to patreon.com slash retronauts and for the low price of three bucks a month you'll receive every episode of this podcast one week in advance and add free and you will help support everything that we do on this podcast including recording spaces hosting flying guests out going to conventions and so on we really appreciate

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But yes, that is Talking Simpsons and What a Cartoon, the Talking Simpsons Network of Podcasts that me and Bob do is our full-time jobs. If you loved all this talk about a classic cartoon, then went into video games, We do that every week on What a Cartoon. We haven't covered the Ninja Turtles yet, but I'm sure it's going to soon. But we have done G.I. Joe, Captain Simian and the Space Monkeys, Winnie the Pooh and Tigger 2, and even animas like Cowboy Bebop and tons, tons more.

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