Paramount Global has finally shared a new trailer and details for TMNT: The Last Ronin.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, TMNT: The Last Ronin is being produced by Black Forest Games. The publisher will be Black Forest’s parent company THQ Nordic. It is being developed for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.
It seems likely that these details were already decided when Paramount Global senior vice president for games and emerging media Doug Rosen announced the game a few months ago. They had just not gotten the clearance to announce everything else yet, but to Doug’s credit, they wanted to get fans hyped up as early as possible.
This is a special moment for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as a video game franchise. It’s easy to take it for granted, but Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has been one of the most prolific and successful licensed video game franchises. It may clearly be a few levels below the likes of Star Wars, but it still has both an enduring and a financially successful legacy.
As a moment of convergence, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles first became successful at around the same time that Nintendo first found global success with the NES. The very first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles video game was released on the NES in 1989.
Through the years, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles video games released sporadically. This will likely surprise you, but there were no Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles video games on the PlayStation, Dreamcast, Nintendo 64, or Sega Saturn!
The lion’s share of the franchise’s most popular and memorable games date back to the fourth generation of consoles, and include arcade games such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time. Later releases were usually connected to the release of a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie or TV show.
Last year, we saw both the release of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection, a collection of those fourth generation games, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge, which clearly harkened to the franchise’s original arcade games.
That makes this release for TMNT: The Last Ronin special, and possibly very important, if it becomes successful. It’s the first time a game is being developed based directly on a comic book. That does make it comparable to Batman: Arkham Asylum the comic book being a direct inspiration for Batman: Arkham Asylum the video game, and starting a franchise out of it. Warner Bros certainly became more involved in their video game efforts thanks to Batman: Arkham Asylum’s success. So would TMNT: The Last Ronin being successful leading to Paramount Global (the company FKA Viacom) entering video games as a major publisher? And what games would they make if they went there? There’s a lot of potent possibility from this one project for sure.
You can watch the first official TMNT: The Last Ronin trailer below.
