Back in Your Commodore magazine and in 1991, their news section stated that Mirrorsoft were producing new Turtles games – two to be precise.
Apparently TMNT 2 was to be more of the same, though actually it turned out to be the arcade game. But what is this of Turtles 3? Well, it is mentioned that Mirrorsoft wanted a 3rd game, but did they envisage it being on the C64 too?
It is plausible that if there really was a 3rd game planned, it could have been for a conversion of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in time (which was released in 1991).
Richard Hewison confirms that a third game was not in the pipeline, and they had barely finished the arcade conversion before the company was put into administration in late 1991.
It seems that the mention of the 3rd game could have been planned as part of the licence deal, but had not been started/planned at all. Either that or marketing were just spreading some hype to the magazines.
Either way, this particular GTW is indeed vaporware, and a GTW we can therefore close the case on.
Case closed…
Contributions: Peter Weighill, Richard Hewison, Cavery210
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Update history
04/09/24 – Quick tidy up of entry + note about Turtles in Time.
I also believe that originally Ocean Software thought they had the licence in the bag to create and produce the arcade conversion even going as far as to produce promotional material for it to promote the game once the deal had been signed, only to be whipped away from under their noses at the last minute by Mirrorsoft, I always wondered would Ocean of made a much better conversion of it on the C64 and Amiga
Ah interesting Aaron – similar to when Ocean advertised Airwolf. Was there any particular magazines that had their adverts in? It’s a tricky one, but I think Probe did a decent job of the C64 version at least.
Knowing that the TMNT/TMHT license was sublicensed from Konami, this was likely either a port of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time (the sequel to the first TMNT arcade better known for its high-quality SNES port, and a real ambitious effort to port to the C64) or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project (the NES-exclusive sequel to the TMNT arcade port.)
Unfortunately its been confirmed that there were no plans for a 3rd game, but had there been – I think its a good shout that Turtles in Time would have been the title to be converted, especially with the 1991 release date. I’ve updated the page to add a note regarding this, so thanks Cavery210!