The Cowabunga Collection brings back 13 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games

The Turtles fight Bebop and Rocksteady in TMNT arcade game.

(Image credit: Konami)

Konami has announced Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection, a sepia-tinged feast for nerds of a certain age (me). The Japanese publisher acquired the rights to the series in 1987, just as it began to explode in popularity, and set about producing a bunch of titles across different platforms: probably the most well-known being the 4-player TMNT arcade game.

The Cowabunga Collection includes 13 TMNT games total, though there's a bit of tripling up with variants of one game. It contains all three versions of TMNT: Tournament Fighters, and they do have major differences—whether you'll want to do a deep-dive on a NES fighting game in 2022 is one question, but for the sake of completionists everywhere it's good to have them in here.

And the nicest thing about this compilation is that it exists at all: with something like TMNT, the biggest barrier to re-releases is working out the licensing (Nickelodeon now owns the franchise and is on-board).

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TMNT: The Cowabunga Collection includes:

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Arcade)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time (Arcade)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (NES)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game (NES)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project (NES)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters (NES)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time (Super Nintendo)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters (Super Nintendo)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Hyperstone Heist (Sega Genesis)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters (Sega Genesis)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of The Foot Clan (Game Boy)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Back From The Sewers (Game Boy)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Radical Rescue (Game Boy)

The collection is being handled by Digital Eclipse, which has worked on things like the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection, the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection, and the Blizzard Arcade Collection.

The games are being shown some love, with the most notable addition being online co-op for four of the titles: TMNT (Arcade), TMNT: Turtles in Time (Arcade), TMNT: The Hyperstone Heist, and TMNT Tournament Fighters (Super Nintendo). There's also a save anytime feature, the ability to rewind, button mapping, and in-game guides for especially fiendish sections.

Here's the announcement trailer. Some childish part of me loves how you get the 'Rated T for Teen' message at the start.

Other notable aspects are the inclusion of Japanese regional versions of 11 of the games (two never got Japanese releases), and the press release promises "loads of extras using imagery from the original cartoons, comics and other historic TMNT media content in a compiled Museum connecting the franchise across the various mediums. Additionally, never-before-seen development art, sketches and game design material will also be included."

With this and DotEmu's upcoming Shredder's Revenge, it's looking like the good times are coming (back) for fans of Turtles games. The Cowabunga Collection releases sometime this year on Steam (there will also be a physical version), and you'll have to shell out $39.99 / €39.99 / £34.99.

Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as "[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike."