Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was developed by Konami and published in North America under its Ultra Games imprint, a label Konami founded in 1988 specifically to get around Nintendo’s limits on how many titles a single publisher could release per year. The game reached the Famicom in Japan in May 1989 and the NES in North America the following month, riding the wave of the franchise’s newly popular animated series, and went on to sell more than 4 million cartridges worldwide, making it one of the best-selling NES games of its era. Players switch between the four turtles, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello, and Raphael, across a mix of overworld map navigation and side-scrolling action stages as they battle Foot Clan soldiers and other villains to rescue April O’Neil and stop Shredder. The game is almost as well known today for its brutal difficulty as for its license, especially its infamous underwater dam stage where a strict timer, drifting seaweed, and homing mines have humbled generations of players trying to defuse the level’s bombs before time runs out.