Where is Johnny Turbo?

Lately, not on the Switch. The entire Johnny Turbo's Arcade line, featuring middling emulations of Data East arcade titles, has recently been purged from the eShop. Golem's Retroclassix, also featuring Data East titles like Heavy Barrel and Bad Dudes, has similarly been excised from Nintendo's online store.

For those who might have missed it, Johnny Turbo was the short-lived mascot of the TurboDuo, a game system that briefly went toe-to-toe with the Sega CD in the early 1990s. Ironically, Jonathan Brandstetter, the inspiration for the husky, hirsute hero who battled the legions of "Feka" in a series of GamePro comics, later migrated to Sega to work on games like the Sega CD sequel to Eternal Champions. (Johnny, how could you? They're not even human!)

As for the Data East library, it's likely that those games will resurface under Hamster's Arcade Archives brand. Hamster already published Burgertime under that label... although it's not yet been confirmed, it's not hard to imagine the rest of Data East's arcade titles following suit. The good news is that Hamster's emulation will be better than Johnny Turbo's or Golem's... the bad news is that you'll have to pay for them all over again.

More news as it happens.