Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles review: four players and a Saturday cartoon

The cabinet plays the cartoon's opening and a piece of the theme song, and a kid walking past stops dead. Four joysticks, four turtles, and the show he watched that morning is waiting for him to step inside.

Why does such a simple brawler work so well?

Up to four players control the Turtles, walking right and hitting everything from the Foot Clan to the Shredder. The controls are one joystick, a jump button and an attack button, and a special move comes from pressing both. That is almost nothing to learn, which matters, because half the players at this cabinet had never finished an arcade game in their lives.

The depth hides in the characters. Donatello has slower attacks but longer range, Michelangelo and Raphael are faster but shorter, and Leonardo sits in the middle. Nobody reads that on a card; you feel it in the first minute, and it quietly decides who in your group plays which turtle for the rest of the summer.

A licensed game works when it lets you do the thing you pretended to do in the backyard.

The street is a weapon

The city is full of things to use. Traffic cones, parking meters and fire hydrants can be hit, enemies can be slammed into walls, and exploding drums clear a crowd. It makes a four player brawl readable: everyone is hitting something, and something is always breaking.

The game pushes back in a clever way. Some Foot Soldiers can restrain a Turtle, pinning him while others attack. With four players, that becomes a little rescue mission every time, and a reason to stay close to your friends.

Four kids, one cabinet

Outside Japan it was sold mainly as a dedicated four-player cabinet, and in some versions your turtle was decided by the coin slot you used. In an American arcade that meant a turtle was a spot you had to claim. You showed up at the mall or the skating rink, saw that someone was already Leonardo, and waited, or joined as whoever was left. Nobody argued about quarters. They argued about turtles.

It was first shown at the AMOA show and became the highest-grossing dedicated arcade game of 1990 in the United States, which anyone who tried to get near one that year could have told you without a chart.

Playing it today

It is repetitive and easy, and that was never the point. With one player it is a pleasant half hour. With four, it is a cartoon you are all inside at once, shouting at each other to come and free you. That still works.