Everyone has that old media property that can hit the nostalgia button regardless of quality. It’s the thing that gets us to put on blinders, march on to the internet, and argue “Actually I think the new one was intentionally bad to make you remember the 1980s version, which means it was successful.” For me, that property is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Thankfully, I’ve left those blinders in the closet this year as the mean green teen team has been hitting it out of the park with things like Shredder’s Revenge and The Cowabunga Collection, but it appears that a new AAA game might also be joining the ranks of Ninja Turtles games I’m actually interested in.
The news comes from this month’s issue Toy World magazine, brought to our attention by NickALive. In the back of the issue on page 170, in a section hyping up this month’s London Brand Licensing Europe convention, are a few paragraphs about Paramount’s plans for the event. The half-page is mostly about things like Paw Patrol and Baby Shark, but it closes with a bit of an update on what Paramount and Nickelodeon currently have going on with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at the end.
“Paramount is also planning a re-master of Konami’s The Cowabunga Collection at the end of the year,” Toy World kind of confusingly states, “and will launch a brand-new original Triple-A game in 2023.”
That’s it, that’s all the details they gave. Taken on face value, we can go by our own gaming industry knowledge of a AAA game being something with a fairly large budget. Presumably Toy World is using that same meaning when talking about this new game.
It would not be altogether unsurprising for Nickelodeon to both announce and release a game in the same year, as that’s their usual modus operandi. The license holder has typically shied away from doing higher budget games in the past, so a AAA TMNT game would be a whole new ballgame for them. Again, assuming we’re all sharing the same definition of AAA here.
I guess we’ll find out sometime in the next 486 days between now and the end of 2023.
