WWF celebrates World Sea Turtle day today and we decided to get in on the action and collect a few little known facts about turtles in gaming. The earliest game featuring a turtle was released by Konami in 1981. It was called Turtles a.k.a. Turpin and players moved their turtle in a maze delivering baby turtles (kidturtles) to their home. On the way they had to avoid beetles and the only offensive weapon at players disposal was the smart bomb that would temporarily stun beetles. We chanced upon this pretty cool manual to the game: arcade-museum/manuals-videogames/T/Turtles.pdf Next up was the multiplayer space shooter Turtle Ship by Philco in 1988 in which players had to defend mankind against alien species. In history a turtle ship was a large warship used in Korea from the XV. century onwards. Another shooter, Ordyne by Namco, was also released the same year. Also a multiplayer the game featured turtle bosses that shrank into baby turtles upon defeat. Perhaps the best-known turtle game franchise is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Over 40 titles have been released between 1989 and 2013 based on the TV series of 1989 and 2003. The TV series was originally called Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles as the word ninja was deemed too violent for the young audience. Earlier versions developed by Konami were successful, however recent releases by Ubisoft and Activision not so much. One of the most popular turtle video game character is anti-hero Bowser. Bowser makes appearances in both the Super Mario and Yoshi universes and his main quest is to marry Princess Peach, conquer the Mushroom Kingdom and defeat Mario in the process. Bowser is actually the turtles Western name. He belongs to a fantasy species called koopa (kuppa in Japanese) but in its home country wasnt given a unique name that could differentiate him from the other koopa characters. After some deliberation US distributors agreed on Bowser. Incidentally kuppa is a Korean dish of soup with rice and Miyamoto Shigeru also considered other Korean dish names for the turtle-like species. We cant leave our collection incomplete without making a final mention of another popular series, Pokemon. This amazingly popular RPG franchise has several characters that take the shape of turtles. Squirtle for example sprays water from its mouth when threatened and Turtwig has a sapling growing from its head. Grotle is also a turtle-shaped character who has trees growing from its shell. We hope you enjoyed this #TriviaMonday article. Let us know if any of the above characters are your favourites - or if we missed someone out.
Posted on: Mon, 16 Jun 2014 13:14:10 +0000
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