Deep Dive: How TMNT Shredder’s Revenge was built on nostalgia and new ideas

gamedeveloper.com:

Game Developer Deep Dives are an ongoing series with the goal of shedding light on specific design, art, or technical features within a video game in order to show how seemingly simple, fundamental design decisions aren’t really that simple at all.

Earlier installments cover topics such as the art pipeline of Pentiment with Obsidian art director Hannah Kennedy, designing the complex economy of Victoria 3 with lead designer Mikael Andersson, and the soft body physics in JellyCar Worlds, with Tim FitzRandolph of Toyful Games.

In this edition, Tribute Games narrative designer Yannick Belzil explains the company's approach to balancing the nostalgia of the series rich transmedia history with that of modern-day design conventions. 

The year is 1990. At the Promenade Du Cuivre mall in Rouyn-Noranda, I step into the arcade, transfixed: there’s a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade cabinet. And the Turtles don’t look edgy and violent like the incomprehensible (to my young mind) NES version. They look and sound like my favorite cartoons! I SLAM my quarters in! “Cowabunga” rings out when I select my Turtle (Raphael, of course). I hop into April’s blazing apartment and start fighting the Foot.

My mind is BLOWN. This isn’t a coin-op machine, it’s a portal into the world of the 1987 Ninja Turtles animated series, in perfect video game format. From then on, any video game based on an established world has to measure up to this.

Flash forward to 30 years later. Tribute Games gets the opportunity to make a TMNT brawler. We want it to have the same impact—but it won’t be easy. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have a legacy as stand-out beat-em-up games. We now have a lot to live up to and something to prove as a studio. There are still games