In the early 2000s, games based on specific movies were becoming a much less regular presence at the top of the charts, with a couple of serial exceptions. Star Wars alone was enough to ensure a continuing flow of successful games based on properties originating from film, but relatively few were directly based on contemporary blockbusters. In the middle of the decade, this trend reversed, peaking in 2007. That year saw five different #1 games based on new films, taking over the top of the chart between them for thirteen weeks out of nineteen as spring turned into summer. It was a dominance unmatched since the days of 1989. Look further ahead, though, and this was to prove rather a last hurrah for games-of-the-movie, or at least for ones not constructed out of lego.
What was going on in 2007? The film world’s increasingly risk-averse move to long-running franchises meant a line-up of big sequels and reboots, including new entries in the Spider-Man and Harry Potter series which had already proved reliable sources of successful games. Beyond that, some of it was likely just the luck of the draw that happens when trying to draw conclusions from such a small sample size. But there also looks like something more to why that precise year was a last chance, and the first of the five games is a good illustration.
As a monumentally popular phenomenon with children in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s based on a less child-friendly indie comic, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles could not have been much better placed for a more mature reboot and an appeal to its now grown-up fans. And with James Ferman and his peculiar obsessions having retired from running the British Board of Film Classification, it could even include nunchaku and the word ninja here!
With the game of that film, there was an additional level of nostalgia at play. Since the 1990 film hit right at a peak era for games-of-the-movie, plenty of players would have fond memories of the game version (a UK #1 based largely on home computer formats) too. TMNT doesn’t recreate that game and its basic 2D, but it’s another game made with at least one eye looking back at games history. It’s in 3D but it’s an extremely linear experience, all the more so for its platforming and combat sections being very clearly demarcated.
As the turtles leap around rooftops and sewers and forests, the 3D element is close to a liability at points, making distances and directions needlessly difficult to judge. It’s worsened by having no control over the camera. As mitigation, the game makes very heavy use of collectible coins as markers for where you are able to go. That’s been a staple of platformers for a very long time, but rarely has their purpose felt so much like a necessity.
Where the back to basics approach works better is that the game is built around an impressive turn of speed. The way that the turtles scuttle along ledges they hold onto is particularly impressive. And it does a lot to encourage forward momentum. Each level gives you a final grade based partly on speed, but more importantly each time you reach a checkpoint (frequent enough to remove the need for too much caution), the time you’ve taken so far comes up on the screen, ticking along like this is Gran Turismo or something. The game’s best graphical idea ties into this nicely too: the turtle’s colour-coded masks are highlighted with a neon blur effect as they move. It looks cool, helps parse some of the darker sections, and brings that sense of speed to the forefront.
Alongside that, there is an up-to-date approach to narrative, which is to completely imbibe the lessons of Grand Theft Auto III’s radio stations on the power of audio, and employ them for good. The story is almost exclusively told not in cutscenes, but in voiceover while you get on with playing. In each level, whether it’s one introducing an individual turtle or showing them working together, you hear the four of them retelling the events, or interjecting into other retellings. The turtles’ voices are provided by the same actors as in the film (although Terrence Scammell replacing the recently deceased Mako as their mentor Splinter is bad on multiple levels), they sound like they’re having fun, and there is a real sense of camaraderie throughout. There is nothing particularly unexpected or great about the plot, but the appeal of this brotherhood is a bigger and more important thing to get right.
That also helps to make Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello and Michelangelo distinct characters once they all working together pretty interchangeably in the game mechanics, using each other as weapons and throwing each other to greater distances. They each get slightly different combat approaches and one special ability, of which Michelangelo’s use of twirling nunchaku as helicopter propulsion is by far the goofiest and most useful, but keeping them otherwise the same is of benefit to the speed. So it’s the audio which makes it feel like spending time with a set of different people.
Those successes help TMNT to an overall result, camera frustrations aside, of something unambitious being done about as well as it could be. And clearly that, along with the association with the film and past games, was enough to make it a success. Its straightforwardness was also very relevant to how it and other movie games were able to do so well in 2007.
The last time a new generation of consoles came along, it took barely more than a year to transition from a UK chart dominated by PlayStation games (up to 2000) to one dominated by PlayStation 2 games (2002). By this point in 2007 the Xbox 360 had been out and successful for a similar period of time, but there was no such single dominant console. The PS3 had only just been released, and Nintendo had become major players again by taking the Wii in a completely different direction from its HD rivals. Developers were having to make difficult decisions about where to take their games, and they wouldn’t get any easier for a while.
In 2006, major standalone games like Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend and Hitman: Blood Money had released on PS2 and Xbox 360, but the industry’s relentless push to showing off higher tech and better graphics wasn’t going to let that hold for long. Especially not with the acutely visible difference between the two. New big names were on their way to power the next generation. They mostly weren’t going to arrive until the end of 2007, though. In the meantime, licenced games had long been in the business of putting the widest possible audience above all else, and were relatively impervious to the downside in terms of critical response. Now was their time.
TMNT was released in much the same form on PS2, Xbox 360, Wii and PC, as well as in a slightly different form on DS and PSP, and a very different one on Game Boy Advance. It climbed the charts as it picked up sales across all of them. The time for these games to be the biggest things around didn’t last very long; players would be persuaded once again to buy into bigger, newer things, as they tend to be. Even as it meant massively increased development costs and furthered unhealthy practices.
That summer of movie games was to leave a lasting legacy in the world of the charts. On the final week one of them was #1, alongside Chart-track’s standard combined formats games chart, they started publishing a second overall chart. It counted each individual format of a given game separately.
Top of the charts for week ending 14 April 2007:
