Why has there never been a good ‘Superman’ game?

Batman has the incredible Arkham trilogy, Spidey has Marvel’s Spider-Man, and a dizzying amount of Marvel heroes are faithfully depicted in Midnight Suns. So, where’s the blockbuster video game starring the greatest superhero of all, Superman?

You would think Superman would be a home run in gaming. His powers of flight, heat vision, x-ray vision, and super strength have all already been present in other games. Exploring an open-world Metropolis sounds like a blast, and kinetic and explosive third-person combat is tricky to get right, but eminently possible. Beyond all that, video games offer a power fantasy to players, and what bigger power fantasy is there than strapping on the red cape and taking to the skies?

It’s not like some developers haven’t tried, though let’s just say that not one of them managed to achieve lift-off…

Whatever happened to the games of tomorrow?

Superman’s first foray into 3D gaming is notorious for all the wrong reasons. Titus Interactive’s 1999 Nintendo 64 game Superman: The New Superman Adventures (usually known as Superman 64) is commonly (and rightly!) regarded as one of the worst games of all time. Flying Supes around feels like pushing a grocery store trolley with a broken wheel, the empty world is full of “Kryptonite fog” to hide the limited draw distance, and the game infamously features a bunch of hovering rings to fly through.

Some of this wasn’t necessarily Titus’ fault. It was inundated with bizarre requests from Warner Bros. and DC about what Superman was and wasn’t allowed to do, with edicts that Superman couldn’t go underwater, that there was to be no property damage and — most bizarrely — that it rework the project to ditch all action in favor of “a Sim City-like game, where Superman would be like the mayor of Metropolis“. This disastrous release has had its bones thoroughly picked over, so let’s just leave that corpse where it lies and move on.

The next major entry was 2006’s Superman Returns by EA Tiburon on PlayStation 2, Xbox, and Xbox 360. This tie-in to the 2006 movie had some good ideas: Superman himself was invincible but Metropolis had a health bar to protect. It also featured decent flying mechanics, with a fun sonic boom when you hit max speed. Unfortunately, that’s where the good stuff ends. Combat is terrible, the graphics are disappointing, and it’s very fiddly to control. On release, it picked up a swathe of bad reviews and has been mostly forgotten.

Superman Returns was the final major console release solely about the character, though he’s since gone on to make many appearances in other games. He’s a prominent figure in NetherRealm Studios’ Injustice fighting game series, is a skin in Fortnite, pops up in various LEGO DC titles, and will soon be arriving as the most dangerous antagonist in Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.

For the developer who has everything

It’s been widely reported that Rocksteady Studios intended to follow up its Arkham trilogy by giving the same treatment to Superman. The rumor makes sense: after all, bringing Batman into a game was a hard nut to crack until Arkham Asylum nailed it, Arkham Knight is littered with Superman Easter Eggs, and if any studio could pull it off, it’d be Rocksteady. The story goes that Rocksteady pitched a Superman game to Warner Bros. and it promptly shot down the idea, resulting in it switching focus to Suicide Squad.

The only problem is that this seems to be solely based on unsubstantiated internet gossip. Noted industry insider and journalist Jason Schreier made his opinion clear in 2018, saying in a QT to Rocksteady’s Sefton Hill:

Interestingly, the sole piece of evidence that a Superman game was ever considered is a piece of concept art by Joël Dos Reis Viegas, who was working for Arkham Origins and Gotham Knights developer WB Montreal at the time:

Whether a Superman game was ever considered or entered development at all is unknown, though whatever the case, we never got a Rocksteady or WB Montreal Superman title, so much of this is academic.

Must there be a Superman game?

So, how might you make a good Superman game? First up, let’s go through the elements that this ideally successful game should have. It would be catastrophic to limit Superman’s powers in any major way, whether it be by Kryptonite fog or another story device. The appeal of playing as Superman is being the most powerful hero on the planet, though actually designing a game around a flying, superfast, and invulnerable player character is a tough nut to crack in terms of game design.

I also don’t want to see Superman’s powers gradually being unlocked as the story progresses. The Arkham games see Batman regularly receiving new gadgets and toys that expand his exploration and combat abilities, though having to progress to a certain point to “unlock” heat vision wouldn’t make sense. I suppose you could tell the story of a young Superman’s powers developing over the course of a story, though playing as ‘Superman Lite’ isn’t what I want.

The 2006 Superman Returns concept of the hero himself being unable to take damage, with Metropolis having a health bar, is actually a fairly smart way around this. But I suspect in practice this would be annoying as it effectively turns the environment into its own weird escort mission and inevitably sets limits on what you can do.

Another hurdle is figuring out who the enemies would be. Batman and Spider-Man can plausibly battle and be threatened by a random mobster with a baseball bat, though any game where Superman is injured by being bonked on the head by some random mook just isn’t going to work. Options are superpowered aliens and robots, though even then it’s hard to imagine any ‘Game Over’ with Superman collapsing on the ground feeling right.

An answer could be to take a leaf out of the Bayonetta games and present a linear game with restricted combat arenas to go nuts in. Bayonetta pulls off Superman-level feats when demolishing supernatural forces, seamlessly switching between over-the-top special moves and in-engine cutscenes to finish off bosses. Maybe this style of action game set on Apokalips, where Superman could really cut loose against god-like enemies, would work. All that said, after the Arkham games and Marvel’s Spider-Man, I suspect most players would be disappointed about not having an open-world Metropolis to fly through.

I also note the underrated 2005 game The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction as a potential way forward. This makes playing as a practically invulnerable hero in an open-world work, though the rampaging and furious tone of the Hulk doesn’t necessarily square with Superman. For example, I can’t imagine Supes being rewarded for going on a “smashing spree”.

What’s so funny about truth, justice and the American way?

The smartest option may be simply not to make this an action game at all. Many top comic book writers over the years have realized that the key to a good Superman story isn’t giving him a giant monster to punch into submission, but putting him in an impossible moral position and forcing him to make some hard choices.

Classic stories like Kingdom Come, All-Star Superman, Red Son, and Up, Up and Away — together with Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel — see Superman dealing with problems that can’t be solved with super strength. So, and this would be a controversial move, what about a cinematic choice-based adventure game in the style of Telltale’s The Walking Dead or Quantic Dreams’ Detroit: Become Human?

Batman has already made the leap to this format in the underrated Batman: The Telltale Series and The Enemy Within, which let players decide how Batman/Bruce Wayne should react when faced with certain situations. A Superman take on this formula wouldn’t necessarily mean no blockbuster action, just that it’d be directed and choreographed: do you blast Zod with heat vision, hurl him into a building, or try to talk him down?

That would also allow you to explore the Clark Kent side of the character. In a traditional action game, this runs the risk of boring the player (see the Mary Jane sequences in Marvel’s Spider-Man), though if you’re tasked with balancing superheroics against keeping your secret identity concealed and interpersonal drama at The Daily Planet it would make for some interesting dilemmas. I’d love to see various story branches, with major changes based on who you’ve revealed your secret identity to and what that’d mean for the story.

A hurdle may be relatively tight restrictions on what DC and Warner Bros. will allow Superman to do, though his portrayal in the Injustice games might indicate that their opinion on keeping the character squeaky clean has loosened over time.

All that said, I can’t deny I still kinda want an Arkham Knight-style open-world Superman game that lets us cut loose, though any developer tackling it has to solve some fundamental design questions with no easy answers. Let’s hope there’s someone out there with the imagination and skills to pull off the Superman game the character deserves.