BACKGROUND
Released by Konami in 1989 when the whole Turtles craze was nearing its height, this title was pretty much guaranteed to be a hit with pre-pubescent schoolboys the world over.

Similar in style to numerous other side-scrolling beat-em-ups doing the rounds at the time, Turtles stood out from the crowd thanks to it's brilliant attract sequence (where a computerised version of the cartoon intro played out on screen while a sampled snippet of the theme music blasted from the speakers) and four player simultaneous action. Gamers hadn't had a teamwork opportunity like this since Atari's Gauntlet series

INTRODUCING THE TURTLES
Most mid twently-somethings can probably name the four Turtles. Although whether they'll admit it is another thing!

LEONARDO - Sports a blue bandana and brandishes a pair of katana blades. As these blades are quite long you can quite easily keep your enemies at bay with a few presses of your trusty fire button.

RAPHAEL - According to the crap but catchy Turtles single "he's the leader of the group". Raph's weapons are a pair of sais. He's quick at attacking the enemies, but as his weapons are short you're always close to a good kicking. Raphael wears a red bandana.

MICHAELANGELO - This Tutle is a master with the nunchakas. Like Raphael he's fairly fast at attacking, but he also suffers from the same problem. As his weaponry is so short enemies have to be close before you can attack. Michaelangelo is the owner of one orange bandana.

DONATELLO - With his bo staff he may be slow to attack the enemies, but as his weapon is the longest out of all the Turtles he has no problems at despatching his enemies from a safe distance. Donatello is the purple bandana wearing amphibian.

CHANGE THAT NAME!
As with the cartoon, kids in the UK had the game renamed to `Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles`. Apparently the powers that be decided the use of Ninja would do the youth of the day no good at all. So, `Ninja` was dropped, and `Hero` took its place.

TMNT Arcade Flyer

HARDWARE SPECS The game uses a 68000 running at 8 MHz for the main CPU, along with a Z80 running at 3.58 MHz. The PCB plays host to no less than five sound chips! These are 1 YM-2151 running at 3.58 MHz, an 007232 chip, a uPD7759 at 0.64 MHz, analog sound samples, and a custom chip. This hardware really helps to capture the atmosphere of the cartoon with catchy jingles and numerous speech samples appearing throughout. [Source: www.klov.com]

SWAP THOSE ROMS! With a simple ROM swap your Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles can be converted into a Turtles in Time as the game uses the same hardware. Turtles in Time was released for the Super Nintendo / Super Famicom at around the same time as its big brother in the arcade.

Turtles - Title Screen

A SOUND TEST OF SORTS
If you've got this board you'll know that the music is really great. It's just a shame that there's no sound test in the test mode. Well, that's not quite true. If you leave the game in test mode and wait long enough it'll play the first few seconds of each sound and tune. Ok, so it's not the whole of each track, but it is something.