Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project arrived in 1991 on the Family Computer in Japan and on the Nintendo Entertainment System in North America in 1992. Konami developed and published it. It is the third Turtles game for the NES, and the first of the three that never lived in an arcade cabinet.
That last detail matters more than it sounds. The previous NES game, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game, was a port. This one is an original. Konami built it for the home console from the ground up, and you can feel the difference in how the levels are paced.
It is based on the 1987 animated series and landed after the show’s fifth season. In 2022 it came back as part of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection.
Key West, and a Hijacked Broadcast
The game opens with the Turtles on vacation in Key West, Florida. They are watching April O’Neil’s latest news report when the broadcast is hijacked by Shredder, their nemesis. He takes April hostage and reveals what he has done to Manhattan: the entire borough is now a floating island. He dares the Turtles to come to his lair and stop him.
That is the whole setup, and it is enough. A beat-’em-up does not need a plot with turns in it. It needs a reason to move four characters from a beach to a final room, and a borough ripped out of the ground and parked in the sky is a better reason than most.
The journey runs eight levels. It starts on the beaches of Florida, crosses to the floating island of Manhattan, passes through the Technodrome, and ends at Shredder’s lair before a last stop on Krang’s Spaceship.
Two Buttons, One Toss, Four Specials
The controls are mostly unchanged from the second NES game. One attack button, one jump button. That is the correct decision. Anyone who played the earlier title can pick this up without a tutorial screen, and the game spends its new ideas on moves instead of on a manual.
The first new move is a toss. Hold the D-pad down and press B, and a Turtle grabs an enemy and throws them. The second is a special attack, triggered by pressing B and A together. Each of the four Turtles has a different one, and every use costs a portion of the energy gauge.
That cost is the smartest thing in the game. The specials are strong, and the game charges you health for them, so they are not a button you mash. The one exception is generous and well judged: on your last bar of life, the special costs nothing.
You can play alone or with a second player, each controlling a different character. Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello are all selectable, each with their signature weapon. Two separate two-player modes are offered. In the first, players can hurt each other with their attacks. In the second, that is switched off.
Losing a Life, and Taking a Friend’s
Lives are limited, and you lose one every time your energy gauge empties. When a player runs out, they can draw from the other player’s remaining stock. That works in one-player mode too. You are also allowed to change characters every time you lose a life, which turns a death into a small tactical decision rather than a pure punishment.
Up to three chances to continue are provided. That is a fair number for a game of this length, and it keeps the eight levels from becoming a wall.
The enemy roster pulls from the cartoon and the toyline rather than inventing new faces. Regular enemies include a variety of Foot Soldiers, plus Giant Mousers and Stone Warriors. The bosses are cartoon and toy villains: Dirtbag, Groundchuck, Slash and Leatherhead, with Shredder and Krang returning as well.
The game features play mechanics similar to the previous game, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game, but it is an original title for the NES without any preceding arcade version.
What the Eight Levels Actually Ask
The structure is a straight line, and that is the point. Side view, walk right, clear the room, repeat. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project never pretends to be anything else, and it never breaks its own rhythm with a stage that does not belong.
The variety comes from the settings, not from the rules. Florida beaches, a floating Manhattan, the Technodrome, Shredder’s lair, Krang’s Spaceship. Each one gives the art team a different palette and gives the player a different backdrop to the same fight. That is a limited kind of variety, and by the last level you have seen most of what the game can do.
What holds up is the combat itself. The toss gives you a way to control a crowd instead of just chipping at it. The specials give you a way out when the crowd wins. The energy cost ties the two together, so the resource you spend on escape is the resource you need to survive.
The two-player modes are where the design gets interesting. Letting players damage each other is not a flaw. It is an option, and it changes what a co-op run means. With it on, your partner is a hazard. With it off, your partner is a second health pool you can borrow from when your lives run out. Konami put both in and let the room decide.
Where the Game Shows Its Age
The roster of bosses is a toy commercial, and it shows. Dirtbag, Groundchuck, Slash and Leatherhead are recognizable to anyone who watched the cartoon, and forgettable to anyone who did not. Shredder and Krang carry the ending because they are the two names the game has spent eight levels earning.
The eight-level run is also short. Three continues soften that, but they do not lengthen it. A skilled player will see Krang’s Spaceship in an afternoon, and the game does not offer much past that first trip. There is no arcade version to compare against, no second quest, no hidden mode waiting at the end.
The specials are the other place the design leaves something on the table. Four different attacks across four characters is a real spread, but the energy cost pushes most players toward one favorite and away from the rest. The character select screen promises four ways to play and quietly narrows to one or two.
None of this is damage. It is the shape of a 1991 NES beat-’em-up made by a team that knew exactly how long the cartridge should last.
The Case for the Third NES Turtles Game
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project is the best of Konami’s three NES Turtles games, and it gets there by not being a port. The Arcade Game had an arcade original behind it. This one had to stand on its own design, and the toss, the four specials and the energy cost are the proof that Konami had more to say about the genre than simply moving a cabinet onto a cartridge.
The two-player options are the part worth defending. Most co-op games of the era treated a second player as a bonus body. This one treats them as a resource, and then lets you decide whether that resource can also punch you in the back. It is a small thing that changes how a run feels.
The weaknesses are real and they are the weaknesses of the format. Eight levels, a short roster of bosses borrowed from a toy line, and a difficulty curve that three continues flatten out. If you want a beat-’em-up to live on your shelf for a year, this is not it. If you want one that plays cleanly from the first screen and rewards a second run, it is.
The 2022 re-release in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection is the right way to meet it now. The game has not changed. What changed is that you no longer need a working NES and a copy of a 1992 cartridge to find out whether the third one was worth it.
It was. Konami’s original NES Turtles game does the one thing a licensed beat-’em-up has to do: it makes the license feel like a reason for the mechanics instead of a substitute for them. Shredder lifts Manhattan out of the ground, and the game gives you eight levels of reasons to go get it back.
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