‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Empire City’ Announced for Meta Quest

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May 28, 2025

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You’ve got a mask wrapped around your face, you’ve got a shell on your back, and your hands have two green fingers made for eating pizza and kicking Foot Clan butt. For anyone who spent their childhood (or adulthood) pretending to be Leonardo, Donatello, Michalangelo, and Raphael, this is as close as you’re ever going to get.

Gorn 2 Creators Cortopia Studios just announced Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Empire City, a brand-new VR experience that puts you into the shells and sewers of the most famous reptiles in history. The game will feature a combination of combat, exploration, and narrative, giving players the opportunity to drop into fights with spinning nunchucks or sneak through the shadows to take things quiet.

Helping to bring the turtles’ unique brotherhood to life is Tom Walts, the author of The Last Ronin and over 100 issues of the IDW Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic series. As a narrative consultant on Empire City, he’s working to make sure the story has that authentic turtle tone.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Empire City hits headsets in 2026. To stay on top of the action, players can wishlist the game on Meta Quest and Steam VR and follow the game on Discord,X, TikTok,Instagram, and Facebook.

We caught up with Ace St. Germain, Creative Director at Cortopia Studios to give us a little more information on the upcoming game.

In recent years, we’ve seen all kinds of projects interpreting the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in different ways, from dark comics to classic kid-friendly cartoons. So tell us about your turtles: Who are they?

We were most inspired by the original Mirage comics, the ’90s movie, and the IDW comic series—but ultimately, they’re you! The moment you put the headset on, you wake up to Ninja Turtle hands, a shell on your back, and your classic weapons. Ultimately, your history with the Ninja Turtles is what defines the brother you choose to embody. So whether you only saw the original animated series from 1987, read all the comics, jumped in during the 2003 era, or discovered TMNT through the 2012 show, Empire City is going to feel like a familiar space.

The characters are voiced, and we did choose some specific canon here and there, but we’ve attempted to blend the most loved and commonly shared aspects of the Ninja Turtles throughout their 40-year history to allow the player to play out their own timeline from here.

We’ve already seen a teaser trailer that’s all about pizza. What were some other interactions that were a must-have for bringing this property to life?

Fighting Foot, parkouring across New York rooftops and alleyways, and just messing around in general.

For combat, we wanted to put the “ninja” back into Ninja Turtles and have some stealth-action gameplay that allows players to thin the herd through sneak attacks and ninja tools before engaging head-to-head.

For traversal, being able to parkour to your destination or use expert movement in combat was non-negotiable. The rooftops of New York are such key locations, and we wanted players to feel the same sense of freedom of climbing, dynoing, leaping, zip-lining, and grappling that the Ninja Turtles have.

And just as important, we wanted to make sure this was a world players could return to. Either alone or with friends, we wanted fans to jump back in to enjoy hanging out. We’re launching with a main campaign, but we’re also launching with extracurricular activities (not just combat challenges) that players can do time and time again.

I love the idea of looking down at myself and seeing those iconic two-fingered hands. How did you make sure the player truly felt like a Ninja Turtle when they put the headset on?

We definitely want the player to have that “whoa” moment when they’re first embodied, so we have full-body avatars. That said, for us, it’s less about telling the player that they’re a specific Turtle and more about giving the player the freedom to be the version of that Turtle they love, along with the constraints to encourage the player to stay true to what makes that brother special across every iteration.

As an example, let’s say you’re playing Donatello and you’ve come across a group of Foot Ninja. Nearby is a turret scanning the area. Are you going to jump into the middle of the fight and start attacking, or would you try to hack the turret for more advantage?

Ultimately, we’d never take either option away from the player, but we’re certainly going to give a Donnie player incentives to leverage what the character is known for.

I’m sure some members of the team have been fans of these guys since for as long as they can remember. What’s it like working with such a treasured IP?

It’s a dream come true. There’s something inherently joyful about working with the Ninja Turtles franchise. The familial humor, absurdity of the world, intense action, gripping storylines, and moments of levity that the IP provides make it easy to dream up fun and meaningful experiences.

Frankly, it’s also a bit stressful. We have 40 years’ worth of fandom to serve! We respect the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles so much, and we want to get as much right as we can while bringing something fresh to the table.

TMNT already has a long history with games, going back to the NES. Was there anything about these earlier TMNT games that inspired you with Empire City?

Absolutely, but we’ve been really cautious to not take the beat-em-up format and lazily transpose it for VR. There’s a joy to TMNT games that comes from their pacing, difficulty, and respect for the source material. TMNT: Empire City is full of callbacks and nods to the shows, comics, and games that came before—but making this a unique VR experience meant flipping known TMNT formats on their head.

In addition to the TMNT titles, we’ve been heavily inspired by non-VR games like Sekiro, the Batman: Arkham series, Ghosts of Tsushima, and Spider-Man. We’ve also played copious amounts of combat and parkour traversal games in VR as we fine-tune how we can most help players feel like a Ninja Turtle.