While they never really went away, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will hold a special place in the heart of many a NES and SNES owner. The 8-bit entry was massively popular during the initial run of the TMNT cartoon show in the early '90s, while Turtles in Time became one of the SNES' most beloved side-scrolling brawlers.

Now, we're getting a game which looks suspiciously like a spiritual successor to that title in the form of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge – and, perhaps even more exciting is the fact that it's being developed by Scott Pilgrim vs. The World studio Tribute Games and is being distributed by Streets of Rage 4 publisher Dotemu.

Speaking to Game Informer, Tribute Games co-founder Jean-Francois Major had this to say:

We wanted to bring back a game for the fans of the ‘87 animated series and also the old arcade games of the ‘90s, because we felt that people missed it. And including us, because, personally, I played those games a lot as a kid and I missed them a lot. So that was the idea that started it.

The bad news? There's no solid release date in place, and we don't even know if it's coming to Switch – according to Game Informer, it's coming to "unspecified consoles" and PC.

Game Informer's interview sheds a little light on how the project came to be. Nickelodeon, which holds the Turtles license, approached Dotemu – which also published the amazing Wonder Boy: Dragon's Trap remake – with an offer to make a game based on one of its IPs. Dotemu picked TMNT, a property that Tribute Games had been keen to work on since 2010.

Tribute Games co-founder Jonathan Lavigne says:

We were always super persistent. Like, if we're gonna take on one of your IPs, we want it to be TMNT. Every time the topic was brought up about us taking on a project, I would always say, ‘Well, we really want to do TMNT.’ We grew up in the arcades and playing TMNT, so we really wanted to have a stab at it.

A chance meeting with Dotemu CEO Cyrille Imbert led to the official beginning of the project, as Imbert explains:

So, I was at GDC and I managed to get [Tribute Games’] contact. So, I said, ‘Hey guys, are you around? Should we talk?’ And so, we saw each other for the first time in San Francisco and it was a really nice first contact, and we basically had the same ideas and things we wanted to do in mind for this project.

How excited are you about this one? What chance do you think this has of coming to Switch? Let us know with a comment below.

[source store.steampowered.com]