Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time Cheat Codes & Secrets

Options Menu Secrets

The SNES version of Turtles in Time hides several useful features inside its Options menu, accessible from the main title screen. Navigate to Options and you’ll find:

Stage Select is available directly from the Options menu without requiring a code — a notable difference from many contemporaries. Select your starting stage, confirm, and the game drops you in with your full continue allotment.

Extra Lives via Score Milestones

Turtles in Time awards a free life at score thresholds rather than through a cheat code. The game grants a 1-Up at 200,000 points, then again at every 100,000 points after that. Focused players grinding through stages on Normal or Hard will rack these up quickly.

Practical tip: The Neon Night Riders stage (the highway level with Bebop and Rocksteady) is particularly dense with enemies. Clearing it efficiently nets a significant score chunk and frequently triggers a milestone life.

Continue System and Credits

The SNES port gives you a fixed number of continues depending on your difficulty setting:

There is no code to add continues mid-run. Manage your health carefully — the super attack (hold Y to charge, then release, or Y + B depending on character) consumes a chunk of health in exchange for screen-clearing damage.

Character Selection Strategy (Hidden Advantage)

No code unlocks alternate characters, but each of the four turtles has meaningfully different hit properties that function as a skill modifier:

Donatello’s long-range staff attacks let you poke bosses from outside their hit zones — effectively a built-in exploit against the Shredder and Super Shredder.

Throw Spam Exploit (Foot Soldier Loop)

The game’s most well-known beneficial exploit involves the Foot Clan’s endless respawn in certain segments. When Foot Soldiers spawn in tight corridors:

1. Grab a Foot Soldier (walk into them; grab activates automatically when adjacent)
2. Throw them toward the screen (press forward + Y) — they slam into the camera and explode
3. A new soldier spawns almost immediately in many corridor sections
4. Repeat for score and to fill the life milestone counter faster

This works most reliably in Big Apple, 3 A.M. (Stage 1) and Alleycat Blues (Stage 2). The soldiers respawn faster than your cooldown allows, so you can sustain a loop for 30–60 seconds before the game advances a trigger.

Ground Juggle and Air Combo Tech

Enemies knocked down can be hit again before they fully recover. Standard attacks that connect on a downed enemy deal reduced damage, but certain charged moves hit grounded targets for full damage. The practical application:

• Knock an enemy down with a standard combo
• Immediately use the charged spin attack (hold Y until the turtle glows, release) while standing over the enemy
• This catches them in the recovery animation and deals full charge damage
• Works on most standard Foot Clan variants; bosses have faster recovery and are more resistant

On Hard mode this technique is near-mandatory for Shredder — the boss fight gives you very little window to attack safely without it.

Super Shredder and Hard Mode Ending

Completing the game on Hard difficulty triggers a slightly different ending sequence featuring a more aggressive final boss encounter. This is not a code — it is gated behind the difficulty selection in Options. There is no special unlock needed; set the difficulty before starting.

Hard mode also enables Super Shredder to use his cape-drag move more frequently and his projectile spam comes in larger bursts. The pattern remains learnable but requires tighter execution.

Co-Op Specific Secrets

Two-player mode has a meaningful hidden interaction: if both players execute the super attack simultaneously within the same frame window, the combined screen-clear hits all enemies twice — once per player’s super. This is not documented in-game and requires coordination. It is easiest to execute at the start of boss phases when both players are at full health.

Player 1 and Player 2 cannot select the same turtle. If Player 1 selects Leonardo, that character is grayed out for Player 2, forcing unique character combinations in every co-op run.

Audio Room and Music Test Usage

From the Music Test in Options, tracks 00–FF are addressable. Not all values play unique content — several are silent or repeat. Notable entries:

Cycling through values above 10 will encounter unused or looping tracks. No hidden messages or developer Easter eggs are embedded in the audio space on the SNES release, unlike some Konami arcade ports.

No Password System

Turtles in Time does not use a password system. It is a continuous run with continues — there is no way to save progress or resume a session mid-game. The Stage Select option in the main Options menu is the intended method for jumping to a specific area without replaying earlier stages.