Sewer Run
- Brand
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
- Year
- 2012
- Objective
- Engagement
- Industry
- Entertainment
- Mechanic
- Arcade & Action
- Platform
- Web
- Agency
- Monks
Objective
Nickelodeon relaunched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as a new cartoon in 2012 and needed a way to keep fans engaged with the show's promo hub between episodes. Letting players step into a turtle's shell and take on the Foot Clan gave the four leads and their weapons a hands-on introduction and gave the franchise's target audience a reason to stick around the site.
Solution
Landing on the show's promo page, the player picks one of the four turtles — Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello or Michelangelo — and drops into the sewers of New York across four levels. Each level splits into a timed chase, where the player has to catch up to their target before the clock runs out, and a brawl, where they knock out a set number of Foot Clan soldiers by deflecting the shuriken thrown at them. Every turtle has its own special move on the Z key, so the same tunnel plays differently depending on who's running it. Once the story levels are cleared, a separate survival mode lets the player keep running for as long as they can to chase a high score.
- 1
An intro screen frames the premise—help the Turtles chase down escaping Foot soldiers through the New York sewers—then lets the player choose between a multi-level story mode of rising difficulty or a survival mode built for chasing a high score.
- 2
The player picks one of the four Turtles—Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello, or Michelangelo—each carrying a distinct signature move tied to its own weapon; arrow keys handle running, jumping, and sliding, while Z triggers the chosen Turtle's special attack.
- 3
Each level opens with a side-scrolling chase through the sewer tunnels: the player runs against a countdown timer, jumping and sliding past traps without stopping, and certain obstacles yield only to the selected Turtle's signature move—Leonardo smashes rocks with his katanas, Donatello pole-vaults gaps, Michelangelo swings across them on his kusarigama, and Raphael scales walls with his sai.
- 4
Catching up to the target switches the level into a combat segment, where the player deflects the Foot soldiers' thrown shuriken back at them to knock out the number of enemies set for that level.
- 5
The story sets up its chase in the first level: the Turtles corner Leatherhead, but he escapes after the first wave of Foot soldiers, and one of them makes off with Donatello's invention, the Battle Data Storage Unit.
- 6
The remaining three levels repeat the run-then-fight structure against tougher tracks and larger enemy counts as the Turtles pursue the thief, and story mode ends when the last Foot soldier defeated turns out to be the one carrying the stolen device, returning it to the team.
- 7
Survival mode strips away the story, running the same chase-and-fight loop without end until the player makes a mistake, turning the score into the reason to run it again.
