TMNT: The Last Ronin, a standalone comic by IDW comics, will be adapted to a video game.
IDW had established a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles universe of their own, with the help of their original creators, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. However, TMNT: The Last Ronin was deliberately written to be from an alternate timeline. Since even talking about this graphic novel requires spoilers, we’ll leave that below and talk about the news for now.
As reported by Polygon, the video game is the initiative of the current IP owners of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Paramount Global FKA Viacom.
The TMNT: The Last Ronin video game will be a single player action game, targeting an older audience of gamers. That does put it at odds with more recent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles video games, such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge, and the retro video game compilation Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection, both from 2022.
Paramount Global senior vice president for games and emerging media Doug Rosen describes the TMNT: The Last Ronin video game as a “third-person action role-playing game similar to Sony’s recent God of War titles.”
Rosen has also opted not to share the name of the studio working on the game for now, but he did say that it will be a few years off from release.
Paramount Global hasn’t had a prominent presence in the video game sphere, unlike Warner Bros Games. However, they have been quietly publishing games for Paramount and Viacom related properties. Aside from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, that has included the rereleases of the Spongebob Squarepants games, Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl, Garfield: Lasagna Party, and Word War Z and World War Z 2.
Paramount Global also have a project with Saber Interactive, a video game adaptation of horror film franchise A Quiet Place, also for older gamers. While Paramount Global’s moves in the video game sphere seem to have been low key so far, they also seem to have been doing their research on what they need to do to leverage their properties fully and successfully.
Spoilers for TMNT: The Last Ronin follow below.
TMNT: The Last Ronin is a five issue series from IDW publishing about how Michelangelo is the sole survivor of an attack on the Turtles and Master Splinter, decades after their original comic book adventures. Embittered and broken, Michelangelo takes on the identity of the Ronin, and moves to enact revenge on the people who killed his family.
That killer turns out to be Oroku Hiroto, the bastard son of Karai and grandson of the Shredder, Oroku Saki. Hiroto has taken over the city of New York, and rules over it with an authoritarian fist.
TMNT: The Last Ronin is based on an idea Eastman and Laird had in the 1980s. It certainly sounds a lot like their take of The Dark Knight Returns for the Turtles. That certainly promises some potential with this TMNT: The Last Ronin video game, but that will all depend on the execution.
