Where did the idea of alternate color Foot Soldiers come from?
 

From TMNT II onward, the games started featuring colored Foot Soldiers aside from the standard purple. The show never did this.

So where did the idea for Red, Yellow, White, Blue and so Foot Soldiers come from?

My theory is to clear away any visual boredom. I suppose they (they being Konami?) figured that slashing virtually the same character over and over again would get dull for kids with their short attention spans so adding a few more colors would bring variation. It could just be that a developer said "Purple? Why Purple? These guys need color!" but who knows?

I'm pretty certain it was the boredom factor. I enjoyed the fact that they changed the color up a bit, but I thought it was kind of strange that they used white for some of them, they always reminded me of the KKK.

How about we try every f***ing beat-'em-up ever?

If we were on facebook I would "like" that post.

First of all, it was the first arcade game forward. Secondly, I'm sure it was just a visual cue for unobservant kiddos not to get all hiney-hurt over the fact that they didn't know they had boomerangs/kunai/etc coming. Plus, you're right that it woulda been boring as hell if they were all the same color.

I absolutely loved the multi-colored legions of Foot! I was always embarrassed whenever I was killed by a pink one. But those spears they carried were deadly!

I think it was a great idea to have different colored Foot in the game. Would be cool it they did it in the cartoons different color for dif roles.

Yoooh-ooo? Am I invisible to you now? It's a staple of the genre brah! EVERY game in the genre has it. EVERY ONE. It's no mystery and it certainly isn't specific to the Turtles games.

Also I'm not certain which came first - the first arcade game or the first NES game (NES says May '89 in Japan whereas all dates I can find for arcade say 1989), but they did the palette swap in that one too, it's just not as prominent. The Foot Soldiers in the Technodrome fight were red. Then again, that wasn't a beat-'em-up, either...

I remember you relaying this before, but I bet you $10 you wouldn't care what color the guy was wearing in real life. I sure as heck didn't. But that was a hatchet and not a spear.

lol... TMI?:p

I hated those fnnn spears. LOL
But I agree as others said previosly. To visually help identify what foot soldiers with what weapons.

Whachoo talkin' 'bout, Willis? O_o What non-TMNT-based beat-'em-ups had Foots?
Oh yeah. I forgeteded all about that. I believe the first NES game was released before the first arcade.

What I meant is every beat-'em-up palette swaps the enemies. It's exclusive to the Feetsesses.

They should make a rainbow foot! LOL

Something's awfully gay-bashy about that idea.

On the subject of footsoldiers, I hated the yellow footsoldiers in Turtles in Time (not the ones that threw bombs) but the ones that threw those green boomerangs things and kicked you if you got close.

They appear in Skull and Crossbones and Starbase: Where No Turtle Has Gone Before.

Come on Gobes, the Turtles aren't above Gay-bashing:

[end]Oldest joke evar.[/end]

Ya know, when you stop to think about it... multi-colored Foot aren't much different from the multi-colored headbands that the Turtles have. I mean, in concept.

There's a long tradition of pallette-swapped characters in video games; my guess would be that Konami was just following typical memory-saving practices by swapping colors to create "new" enemies out of existing ones. It's possible that the turtles' different colored bands might have inspired the move as well.

I still think Playmates was crazy not to exploit the situation and release craploads of repainted Foot Soldiers--I mean, toy companies just LOVE to sell you the same figure over and over again if they can get away with it.

I always thought they were Yoshis.

I liked the idea of different Foot each with different weapons. Hell, the newer games felt kinda boring with all the Foot being black with no variation. But hey, that's how it goes for beat-em-ups. Remember the human-sized multi-colored Sentinels from the X-Men arcade?

Strangely enough, the only one of the completely new games in the last decades, Arcade Attack, brought back multi-colored Foot but still ended up being the most tedious game the license has been involved with.

Most toy companies would jump at the chance, but Playmates is only interested in selling the four Turtles over and over again and giving all the other characters the shaft.

^^ this. Color pallette swapping is so easy, plus woudn't you feel bad beating up hundreds of purple foot soldiers wielding different weapons as opposed to yellow ones with boomerangs or pink ones with yaris, or red ones with humorously large mallets.

Comically large mallets indeed.

Video games often use palette(sp?) swaps but at least TMNT had the different colored foot sporting different kinds of weapons. When a vast majority of what you're fighting are robots poorly dressed as ninja assassins it's good to at least have those robots come in more than one color I guess.

Kind of a shame the cartoon didn't do the same for different kinds of foot ninja but the 2003 cartoon did have some differing styles that were more than just palette swaps. For both the cartoon and the games.

^^This is true. I liked the fact that in many of the 2k3 toon inspired games there were the regular foot ninjas, the foot techs, and the large super muscular foot ninjas. I also liked how there were different outfits like the feudal foot ninjas.

The practice is, unfortunately, still alive and well, even in 3D. Programmers take an enemy model, reskin it, or maybe add a few horns or something, and voila, new recycled enemy.

Regarding the Foot with mallets, I remember Game Players' Magazine had a humorous description of them: "Croquet mallets, the weapon of choice for the refined ninja". Another winner from that same issue, referring to the Foot that throw those big, yellow bombs at you: "Too poor to afford rocket launchers, these Foot throw their bombs at you."

^^Ha that's funny.