Konami did produce a number of Turtles titles from 2003-2005, and it’s a pity that they’re not also present here. There were a handful of computer titles and dodgy handheld LCD games that aren’t here, but they weren’t Konami games. That’s still a whole lot of turtle power on display, and to Konami’s credit it’s 100 per cent of its output of Turtles games during that era.

TMNT: Tournament Fighters (NES/SNES/Megadrive).

TMNT II: Back from the Sewers (Game Boy).

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Arcade/NES).

So, when you take that into account, it’s really only 9 games, not 13, specifically: It’s also a horizontal slice, presenting the different format versions of a number of titles along the way. What Konami has done here is interesting, because it’s not just a vertical slice over the years around what it did with Turtles games. 13 is famously an unlucky number, and you’d be unlucky if you figured that was 13 different titles, however. On the surface, it appears that Konami’s being super generous, because Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection includes 13 turtles games from the late 80s through the mid-90s. Don’t think I’ve forgotten you either Sega. With so many retro collection packages out there, I was very keen to see what Konami would do with the Cowabunga Collection, if only because other Japanese development houses have tended to be… shall we say.

Related reading: Konami actually did a really good job with the Castlevania collection, too.

If you were playing a console TMNT game in the late 1980s or early 1990s, it was made by Konami, or one of its subsidiaries (when it was trying to get past Nintendo’s output limits for the NES). A wide variety of companies have held the licence to produce TMNT games over the years, but Konami can lay claim to having been the first.

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