Retrospective of Superman: The New Superman Adventures (AKA Superman 64)

“This tedious, boring, bland game is joyless and barren of any entertainment value.” ― Unknown

By Patrick S. Baker

No one starts out to fail. Everyone that has ever begun a project, be it to fix a squeaky door, build a building, or develop a world-class video game, has done so with the expectation that they will succeed.

They expect that the door won’t make noise, the building will not collapse, and the video game will not be Superman: The New Superman Adventures better known as Superman 64.

In 1996, Warner Brothers Animation Studio was developing Superman: The Animated Series for the WB TV network. Eric Caen, co-founder of French game development company, Titus Interactive, heard about the forth coming TV series while visiting Titus’s Los Angeles office and went hard for the game development license.

No other game development company seemed interested in Superman and Warner executives asked Caen three times if he was sure of what he was doing. In early 1997, Caen inked a deal with Warner Brothers to create games for the Game Boy, Nintendo 64, and Sony PlayStation based on Superman: The Animated Series.

Things went wrong for Titus from the start. Days after signing the licensing agreement the Warner Brothers team changed and, for some reason, they took an instant and intense dislike to Titus Interactive. The Warner team tried to stop the development of the game all together. When they failed at that they started mandating changes to the design of the game. Caen and Titus wanted to create a real-time strategy adventure game in a 3D open-world environment, where Superman would “fly and fight, and include his every superpower.”

Warner rejected this idea and insisted that Superman’s powers are limited and there be no breakable architecture. Further, Warner demanded that the game be placed in a “virtual world” so that Supes would not, and could not, hurt any “real people”, although Superman did break things and hurt people in the comic books and TV series. Also, the development process was slowed as it took Warner months to approve the design of every character used.

In the wake of the disastrous reception of the final game, few remember the good pre-release buzz for the game. Superman 64 was previewed at the 1997, 1998, and 1999 E3 trade shows. At the 1997 show, an IGN corresponded was negative about the game, but the Animation World Network reporter was far more upbeat calling the 3D environment, fight, and rescue levels “stunning”. At next year’s E3, GamePro said the graphics were “good-looking.”

GameFan Magazine printed several screenshots of the game in June 1998. The writer was “thrilled” to see the photos. He also called the graphics “astounding”, and the game would “raise the bar” on the Nintendo 64 system.

The next month, Gamers’ Republic said the Superman in the game was “beating up the bad guys and solving puzzles” and that the levels looked “well-designed”, and the multi-player mode was like StarFox.

The finished Superman: The New Superman Adventures was released in May 1999 and sold surprisingly well. Some data indicated that Superman 64 was a top-ten best seller in North America in June 1999. The next month, Titus said that Superman 64 was the third bestselling game for the Nintendo 64. Titus also said that consumer feedback was “overwhelmingly positive,” with more than 70% of the game’s target audience of 6 to 11-year-olds, rated the game an ‘A’.

To say the very least, the critics’ reviews were not so good. The aggregated score of 15 contemporary reviews was a stunning 22.7, this makes Superman 64 the Guinness Book of World Records holder for worst-reviewed video game to date. The reviewers said the controls were baffling, tricky, and hard to handle. Others called the gameplay “foggy and empty”. More reviewers called the missions “obscenely stupid” and the melee combat was “slow, awkward, and imprecise.” One reviewer called the game a “turkey” and said the only way to stop flying was to crash into a wall.

The only part of the game to escape severe thumping were the character designs, which were lifted straight from the WB cartoon, and the voice acting.

Superman 64 continued to receive a critical drubbing well into the Twenty-first Century being ranked as the worst, or one of the worst video games, of all-time by GameSpy in 2004, GameTrailers in 2006 and The Guardian in 2015, as well as many others.

However, much like the infamously bad movie, Plan Nine from Outer Space, Superman 64 has developed “a fan base of curious masochists”, who are “dedicated to the anti-glory of Superman 64…”

Patrick S. Baker is a former US Army Field Artillery officer and retired Department of Defense employee. He has degrees in History, Political Science and Education. He has been writing history, game reviews and science-fiction professionally since 2013. Some of his other work can found at Sirius Science Fiction, Sci-Phi Journal, Armchair General and Historynet.com

Sources:

AllGame “Superman [N64] – Review“.

Animation World Network (August 1997), “The Ever-Expanding E3 (Does that make it E5?)”

Electronic Gaming Monthly. (July 1999) “Superman (N64)”.

GameFan (June 1998). “Superman”

GamePro. (April 1997). “Inside Scoop”.

GamePro. (August 1998) “License to Thrill.”

GameSpy. (July, 2004). “Comics to Consoles: Part II – When Good Comics Go Bad”.

Gamers’ Republic (July,1998). Is It a Bird? Is It a Game?

Guardian, The. (October 16, 2015) “The 30 worst video games of all time – part two”.

Guardian, The (August 27, 2018). “So bad they’re good: five terrible video games that people loved anyway”

Guinness Book of World Record, “Lowest-rated superhero videogame”