A playthrough of Konami's 1989 license-based beat 'em up arcade game, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Played through as Leonardo on the game's default difficulty setting. At 28:05, once the ending finishes, I reset the machine and let the attract mode run to show all of the character profiles.

Coming out at the tail end of 1989, the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game stands out as being one of the best looking and sounding video games of the 1980s, perhaps matched only by Capcom's Final Fight.

It also came out around the time the Turtle's popularity was really beginning to skyrocket. Their action figures were some of the most popular toys at the time (I had the sewer playset and the turtle van!), the TV show was watched by pretty much every elementary school-aged boy in America, the recent NES game (   • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (NES) Pl...   ) was rocking the sales charts, and the announcement of the upcoming movie had everyone hyped. The turtles were a cultural phenomenon, and this giant 4-player arcade cabinet helped to fan that flame.

It had everything you could've asked for in a video game based on a license in 1989. The game starts with a partial recreation of the cartoon's intro that included a high quality recording of the theme song. You could play as any of the four turtles, and each had their own strengths and weaknesses. Several of the show's villains appear as bosses, complete with fully voiced taunts that sound like they were recorded by the original cartoon cast. The controls were easy to grasp, and even if the nuances went straight over your head, you could still have a great time by just bashing buttons alongside three of your friends.

And all of this was wrapped up in a "next-gen" level of technical wizardry that put most other arcade games of its time to shame. It was built on Konami's latest hardware platform (the same as Crime Fighters was based on:    • Crime Fighters (Arcade) Playthrough -...   ), allowing the screen to be absolutely flooded with special effects and large, well-animated bad guys with no slowdown whatsoever, even in four-player mode. The style pulled its weight, too - nothing looked like second-rate fan art here, and the soundtrack was full of exciting, sample-heavy original music that incorporated threads of the show's theme song to keep it sounding familiar.

It's a great game, and I'm glad that it's going to be included in the Cowabunga Collection. It was ported to several platforms, but the original arcade game has only once seen a completely faithful console representation (the Xbox 360 version) over the past thirty-three years.

And if you like the music, be sure to check out my NES mixes of several of the tunes! You can find that here:    • ♫TMNT: The Arcade Game, NES Arrangeme...  
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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