Turtles

Turtles is a 1981 arcade game from Konami, dating from the earliest era of the Japanese giant, before Frogger and Gradius made its name famous worldwide. In North America the cabinet was licensed by Philips, under whose name this record is filed.

The premise is unusually gentle for its day: playing as a turtle, you navigate the maze-like floors of a building, picking up baby turtles and carrying them to safety while enemies prowl the corridors. It belongs to the maze-chase family that Pac-Man launched a year earlier, but with ideas of its own – rescuing little ones instead of eating dots, and the ability to drop obstacles in your pursuers' path.

1981 marked the peak of the arcade golden age. Cabinets lived on instant readability: one glance at the screen had to be enough to understand the rules, and Turtles masters that discipline completely. As was customary, two players can take alternating turns chasing the high score.

Early Konami titles are sought out today as documents of a studio finding its voice – the playfulness and clean design visible here run through everything the company made afterwards.

Home players could meet the game through conversions to the consoles and computers of its day, but the arcade original remains the purest form of the idea. The simple melody and insistent pacing build a tension that keeps the floor-by-floor chases surprisingly gripping more than four decades on – and the rescue theme gives the pursuit an unusually sympathetic motive.

The turtle rescue mission launches straight in your browser window on OldGame.cz, faithfully emulated through MAME.