The Hollywood Byte #59: TMNT's Kevin Munroe

"With videogame levels, you have a polygon budget and you have to figure out how to cheat, scope and scale into your world and not take a huge hit and keep polygons where they mattered," said Munroe. "When I started at Shiny it was around the same time that Tomb Raider was in development and it was just as 3D was starting to kick in. My foray into CGI was videogames. When we first started in games we had six joints on a 300-poly character and we were pushing the limits."

In many ways, the Konami TMNT videogames have allowed the Turtles to find new fans over the past decade, filling in the void left when the Hollywood films stopped.

"The Konami videogames really kept the Turtles alive for all of those years," said Munroe. "I don't see much of a correlation between this new Ubisoft game and the Konami stuff. The Ubisoft game looks and plays the way I think all Turtles games should play. The Prince of Persia mechanic just feels so right on the Turtles. In the original NES game, you played different levels as different characters. Now it's all about teamwork and family, which are the themes of the new film."

After spending so many hours working on the CGI movie, Munroe is just now getting to his list of games that he wants to play.

"I love the Wii," said Munroe. "I can't get enough of Wii Sports. That demo disc that came with the Wii gets the most play in our house. Picking up that controller gives me the same feeling as the first time I played Pong or Space Invaders. There's something about it. Graphically, there's nothing to write home about. At the same time, there's that brilliant simplicity that Nintendo does that sells it to me. I'm playing Zelda on Wii right now."

Munroe said he also has a PS2 at home, as well as a PSP and Nintendo DS. He said he has access to a PS3 at work.

"There wasn't a lot to write home about," said Munroe. "It didn't feel that special to me that I had to drop $600 on it."