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In 1987, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird developed a storyline for their creation that never came to fruition. Titled “The Last Ronin,” Eastman and Laird envisioned it as the final Turtles story set 30 years in the future. While Eastman and Laird never got around to creating that storyline in the original run of their comics under their company Mirage Studios, the idea stuck with Eastman through the years, and decades later, as part of the franchise’s new life with IDW Publishing, he worked with his longtime collaborator Tom Waltz to bring the idea to the pages of a five-issue miniseries that ran from 2020 to 2022.<\/p>\n
The story is bleak and gritty, establishing a universe where the four beloved brothers have been taken out one by one. It’s set in an alternate future where New York has been ravaged by constant battles under the thumb of the fascist grandson of the Shredder, Oroku Hiroto. The last remaining Turtle, bearing the weapons of all four, goes on a quest to avenge his fallen brothers against Hiroto.<\/p>\n
One of the central mysteries surrounding the storyline is in regards to which of the brothers is the sole survivor. As the miniseries ended in 2022, the answer is obviously readily available on the internet, but we won’t spoil that here, even though we don’t know if the game will follow the same path as the comic<\/p>\n
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The Last Ronin<\/em>\u00a0was a surprise success and, according to Eastman, brought in fans of the franchise from all eras and walks of life. “It just opened up like a Pandora’s Box of a lot of original fans finding it or\u00a0maybe fans that were fans back in the day but have not picked up a Turtle thing in years were coming back to it,” he says. “It just had the snowball effect that people that have never read Turtles or even some of the kids that were introduced to the Turtles in the 2012 series […] but have grown past that middle part of the animated series, but they still liked the Turtles but were looking for something older and edgier. It was just right place, right time, and it just clicked and jammed and worked, and we were all like, ‘Wow!'”<\/p>\n Paramount, which now owns the TMNT franchise, wanted to capitalize on the success and acclaim of\u00a0The Last Ronin\u00a0<\/em>by taking it multimedia, but concerns emerged about conflicting with the 2023 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem\u00a0<\/i>film. “It was such a clever idea by Paramount and Nickelodeon in the surprising success of The Last Ronin<\/i>,” Eastman says. “They were already well down the road with the incredible\u00a0Mutant Mayhem<\/em>\u00a0project and everything they wanted to do there, and they said, ‘We’d love to do something with\u00a0The Last Ronin<\/em>, but we don’t want to battle each other and take away from [Mutant Mayhem<\/em>].’ I’d describe\u00a0Mutant Mayhem<\/em>\u00a0as a kids-of-all-ages movie, much like the first Turtle movie that Steve Barron and Jim Henson did. [Paramount] said, ‘Let’s go and adapt it as a video game because we can give it all the edge and all the attitude and intensity that you did in the comic series and even go a bit deeper.'”<\/p>\n