Turtles Cowabunga Collection shows Digital Eclipse are still the masters of the interactive video game museum

I’ve seen a few people whingeing that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection is “too expensive”, that £34.99 is “too much for just 13 games”. To those people, first of all I give them a good slap for being greedy bastards (£34.99 for 13 games is about £2.50 a game, you tightarse), and secondly — some might say more reasonably — I would encourage them to think of this collection not simply as a bundle of retro games, but rather as an admission fee to an interactive digital museum of all things Turtles video game-related.

This is something that developer Digital Eclipse has always been very good at. You’d hope so, what with former games journo and founder of the Video Game History foundation Frank Cifaldi having his job role listed as “head of restoration” and having said that, long-term, he wants Digital Eclipse’s work to become considered as the video game equivalent of the movie industry’s premium Criterion Collection — in other words, to celebrate more than just the games, but also the culture around them and their original context.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles The Cowabunga Collection

“That’s the elevator pitch,” he said in conversation with Vice’s Waypoint back in 2015, around the time of the Mega Man Legacy Collection’s release. “I don’t say that officially because it’s so hard to make that comparison. As much as we’ve done here I think we’re years away from [that level] because what they do far exceeds the scope of what we’re able to do right now. I’m hoping that [our work] will wake up the rest of the industry, in understanding that people do appreciate these [games] not just as commercial products, but as culturally significant works that are worth encapsulating in a way that contextualises them and treats them with respect.”

Digital Eclipse’s work in this regard is more than just slapping a bunch of emulators on a disc or Switch cart and being done with it. For starters, the games aren’t running on an emulator in the same way as other retro collections; they are instead running on Digital Eclipse’s own Eclipse Engine, which allows the company to decompile the code from older games into a format that is more easily readable — and portable — to modern platforms.

By doing this process once at the beginning of a project, they’re able to bring the games to any modern gaming system, rather than having to recode them completely each time they want to rerelease them on new platforms. In other words, now the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Cowabunga Collection has been successfully released on today’s platforms, it should be simplicity for the company to bring it to new generations of hardware as and when the market demands. That’s not only good preservation of old titles, that’s thinking ahead.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection

In the case of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Cowabunga Collection, that means 13 playable games from across the arcade, NES, Mega Drive, Super NES and Game Boy Platforms, all of which play just as they did back in the day — warts and all. That’s not all, though, because each game can be enhanced with some optional tweaks that make them easier to enjoy, such as a rewind feature, the ability to watch a successful playthrough and jump in at any time, and even full-on cheat modes for invincibility or level selects, even where no such features existed in the original games.

On top of that, you’ve got your obligatory display options, allowing for pixel-perfect scaling to modern displays to eliminate “shimmering”, full-height scaling or (shudder) full 16:9 stretching to the full width of a modern display. You can also simulate various types of display, including the dot-matrix LCD display of the Game Boy, allowing for as close an approximation of playing these games on original hardware as today’s simulations allow.

Each game also includes an excellent Strategy Guide feature in the style of a ’90s games magazine, each of which offers a selection of game tips (many of which feature demonstrations of the tips in practice) as well as useful bonuses such as maps and power-up explanations — plus an occasional bit of wry commentary on how far we’ve come in gaming.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection

But that’s not all, either; on top of the games and these additional features, there’s also a more museum-like section in which you can browse a wealth of features that relate to all of these games. All of the games’ original manuals are included, for example, in high-quality scanned format — even complete with the original Nintendo branding in many cases, which is quite unusual to see preserved in projects like this. Then there’s a selection of stills from the various Turtles TV shows — sadly no watchable episodes — as well as comic covers, concept art, design documents and all manner of other bonus material.

It should hopefully be clear by now that with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Cowabunga Collection, you’re not “just” getting 13 games to enjoy — you’re being invited into a full-on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles video game museum. It’s a celebration of the games themselves, the contexts in which they were released, the related media that surrounded them — and the amazing endurance of Turtles as a cultural phenomenon over the years, with video games playing a significant role in how that came about.

Sure, some of these games can be a little tough to go back to today — the original NES game and the early Game Boy titles are likely to be too much of a slog for many modern gamers, though the rewind and save state features make them more accessible than ever — but there’s still a ton of excellent titles that still hold up enormously well today, too.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Cowabunga Collection

We’ll talk more about the specifics of each release in this compilation in a new upcoming series here on Rice Digital, but for now it’s worth pondering some of the notable highlights. There’s the original arcade game, of course, which is a timeless classic, particularly when enjoyed with friends. Turtles in Time’s legendary Super NES port is also present and correct, and to many people is actually preferable to the arcade version due to its mechanical tweaks and overall rebalancing.

But one a lot of people might not be super-familiar with is the third Game Boy release, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Radical Rescue. This is an early example of the open-structure, non-linear, exploratory side-scrolling platformer, and as a 1993 release it predates the genre’s true codifier Castlevania: Symphony of the Night by a good five years. It’s also a damn good game, so if you pick up the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Cowabunga Collection, be sure to spend some time with this one.

Anyway, I think I’ve made my point for now. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Cowabunga Collection is a prime example of how video game history should be preserved and celebrated. With the wealth of additional material bundled in alongside the games — plus the solid recreations of the games themselves — this is the closest you’re going to get to an interactive “textbook” on the history of Konami’s Turtles games, and I sincerely hope we see more releases of this astonishingly high quality from Digital Eclipse in the future.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection is available now for PC via Steam, physically and digitally for Switch, physically and digitally for PS5, physically and digitally for PS4, and physically and digitally for Xbox One/Series blahdepoop.

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Pete Davison
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