1993: By 1993, something is definitely starting to go wrong in Konami's Japanese coin-op division, perhaps a result of the dramatic changes taking place in arcades and the world; neither seems to be interested in more TMNT merchandise. One-on-one fighting games, led by Street Fighter II pseudo sequels and Mortal Kombat games, are now dominating the market, and despite their obvious ability to sit down and conceptualize a Yie Ar Kung Fu sequel to combat Capcom's market supremacy, Konami's honchos look elsewhere for success. Therefore, with a single exception, 1993 is a very low-key year for Konami's arcade team, as a couple of extremely weak titles begin to indicate that the company has fallen out of touch with the marketplace it once led.

In this same year Konami unveils Cowboys of Moo Mesa, another cartoonish Western title in the vein of Sunset Riders, albeit this time with animal characters and a "cow" theme. In the United States, 1993 also sees the release of Metamorphic Force (a bland beat-em-up with little going for it, save a character's ability to transform into a ferocious animal), as well as other forgettable titles such as Mystic Warrior, Violent Storm, and Polynet Commander. In Japan, a couple of titles do well but are never released in the States: Gaiapolis, an overhead action game with a vertical monitor, and Dadandan, a one-on-one fighting game that may have been a licensed Japanese property. It says something when the company's most successful game of 1993 is Run'n Gun, a pre-polygon sprite-based basketball game with huge characters and a scaling/zooming court, but even Run'n Gun's success is heavily dampened by Midway's reemergence in arcades as the producer of NBA Jam. Which game went to the top and which was memorable (yet in the background) would later become clear, but it is at this point that Konami begins to show signs that its good games were being thwarted by competitors.

It was in 1993 that Konami hit its historic low point with the arcade release of Martial Champions. Granted, the company's other games that year were bland (save Run'n Gun), but Martial Champions was just plain bad. It was Konami's attempt to enter the one-on-one fighting game market with its own powerful arcade board. It not only missed on all counts, it missed quite badly. By this point, Konami had developed an incredible set of technologies for its arcade hardware, including a stellar sound processor with the ability to play back superb digitized audio and graphics chips that allowed for huge characters, complex animated backgrounds, and the scaling of each in real time. Konami's hardware was arguably far superior to Capcom's vaunted CPS and CPS2 in all ways. Martial Champions attempted to capitalize on the board's ability to produce huge characters and did so to its disadvantage - unlike Street Fighter II, you could barely consider air attacks an option because the characters consumed so much of the screen.

Moreover, the characters were ridiculously conceived and empowered with poor moves, and the cartoonish style of the artwork diminished, rather than heightened, the game's appeal. Interestingly, the only system to receive a translation of Martial Champions was that which was most ill-equipped to reproduce it, namely the then-declining Japanese PC engine, which even in CD format offered up a rendition pared down past the point of recognition.

In the home market, though, Konami was proceeding at full steam ahead in both Japan and the United States, aggressively capitalizing on its licensing team's efforts and expanding its repertoire to include all genres of games. The US wing of Konami opted not to release some of the Japanese parent's more ethnically Japanese titles, including Parodius (ostensibly for seminudity and a section where an "Uncle Sam" Eagle must be shot down) and Powerful Pro Baseball (though reworked into Bottom of the 9th). It instead started to form alliances with outside developers, including Park Place, in order to get some titles that would be more appealing to American audiences. Konami's release of NCS' robotic title Assault Suits Valken was renamed as Cybernator for the SNES and was accompanied by the mediocre Park Place-developed NFL Football, the incredible beat-em-up Batman Returns, LucasArts' so-so overhead title Zombies Ate My Neighbors, solid conversions of Lethal Enforcers and Sunset Riders, and TMNT: Tournament Fighters, a game attempting to clone Street Fighter II with Turtles characters. The Genesis, meanwhile, received the original action game Rocket Knight Adventures, Lethal Enforcers, as well as a horrid (and unrelated to the SNES game) version of TMNT: Tournament Fighters, which looked like a manufacturing mistake. Konami simultaneously debuted its first 16-bit peripheral to coincide with the release of Lethal Enforcers, a fluorescently colored home light gun shaped like a pistol, called the Justifier. For the Game Boy, Konami released Zen: Intergalactic Ninja, Tiny Toons Adventures: Montana's Movie Madness, Kid Dracula, Raging Fighter, Batman the Animated Adventure, and, of course, TMNT 3: Radical Rescue. By this time, Konami was finally seeing that the decline of the NES market was to be permanent and released only Tiny Toons 2, another wholly different version of TMNT Tournament Fighters, and Zen: Intergalactic Ninja for the 8-bit system. Konami also released its first Sega-CD game, Lethal Enforcers, which was very largely similar to the cartridge version for the Genesis.

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