Arcade cabinet maker Raw Thrills has confirmed it’s currently working on a new machine featuring the heroes in a half shell as depicted in the Nickelodeon cartoon currently in its fifth season.
The new game is apparently being built from scratch with new assets to mirror the current TV show and with an eye toward modernizing the genre past Turtle games hailed from. Raw Thrills told Arcade Heores “This new version of TMNT is a completely new re-imagining of the brawler concept. There are more moves, more environmental interaction, cool Turtle Power special attacks, voiceover from the entire cast (including Seth Green and others)… it’s really amazing.”
THIS IS NOT A DRILL
A NEW 4 PLAYER ARCADE NINJA TURTLE BEAT EM’ UP IS COMING OUT
AHHHHH pic.twitter.com/S7LeCbgsmW— Batt McMadness (@MattMcMuscles) October 20, 2017
You might have fond memories of playing Konami’s 1989 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles beat-’em-up. It was based off the original cartoon which began airing thirty years ago and later ported to the NES. It was a brutal coin-eater, especially if you played alone, but helped pave the way for a follow-up, Turtles in Time, which remains one of the best dying-simulators from the genre’s SNES golden age. While that style of game has been mined in recent years by indie developers, the experience isn’t really complete without that feeling of being hunched over a machine with three other people all furious they didn’t select Donatello first.
The new cabinets will use HD screens and measure about nine feet tall and four and a half feet across with the company planning to demo the game at this year’s International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions expo mid-November.
The new TNMT cabinets are just one in a long line of arcade-based revivals Raw Thrills has attempted over the last decade. The company entered the business in the early aughts, long after the rise and fall of arcades, with gambling games for bars before moving onto movie adaptations like The Fast and the Furious arcade adaptation. After that they moved onto collaborate with Konami on Guitar Hero Arcade and later teamed up with Specular Interactive to produce a sequel to the 90s speedboat racer Hydro Thunder.
Just this year, the company began testing an Injustice arcade cabinet adaptation that tried to re-create NetherRealm’s fighting game with a card collecting element that left some people scratching their heads. Hopefully the TNMT adaptation will stick the landing a little more cleanly (and also not require me to drive three cities away to get my hands on it).