Superman is the white whale of video game superheroes

Still, it’s been decades since Superman 64. You’d think that the renaissance of superhero media that began in the aughts would, by this point, have generated a Superman game that’s a clear success. Instead, we’ve gotten a string of messy production cycles on big-budget games that belie an ongoing universal truth: It’s damn hard to tell a Superman story of any kind. Nailing an interactive one? You might have a better chance of stopping a tornado.

The hunger for a new Superman game is there, though; just look at the reception to a humble project released in 2022. Following the release of Unreal Engine 5, game developer Tyson Butler-Boschma wanted nothing more than to fly around the “next-gen” city Epic Games built to show off the new engine. Superman seemed like an obvious pick for the job — and footage of the diversion instantly went viral on social media. On YouTube alone, a video of his Superman gliding across a metropolis has been viewed millions of times. The reception to the demo was so positive, scammers stole his work and sold it on Steam.

“If this was done by one person I can’t imagine what a whole studio can do,” one YouTube commenter wrote. “Come on WB give us a Superman game.”

Speaking to Polygon, Butler-Boschma says he knows that part of what made his work so tantalizing is that people can’t turn to a modern Superman game — so they’ll take the next best thing.

“We have Batman, Spiderman, but the OG is nowhere to be found,” Butler-Boschma says. “So when I, as a single dev, release something that looks like it was built by 100’s of people with high production value, it naturally causes a lot of conversation about why we haven’t seen a game like this from a prolific AAA studio, especially if 1 random dude can do it?”

There have been attempts, of course, but all of them have fallen short of delivering a definitive Superman experience. The first crack came out in 1979 for the Atari 2600, and to its credit, the game offered many of the critical elements necessary for a good Superman game. The player controls Clark Kent, who begins the adventure by climbing out of a phone booth with a cape in tow. From there, Superman can soar through the skies of Metropolis in the name of stopping Lex Luthor’s latest evil scheme. While the Man of Steel’s toolset is limited, the player can pop on his X-ray vision to look ahead. If the player falters, Lois Lane can pop in to revive Superman. On paper, it’s all solid. The major figures are there; players can fly. But a retro game that came out before the advent of side-scrolling or 3D worlds can only go so far, especially with graphics that are essentially a series of crude rectangles. The main indicator that this is a Superman game lies in the game’s cover art; otherwise, you need to read the manual to understand what’s going on.

A handful of games followed, and while the underlying technology improved from game to game, the same big-picture issues plagued these early Superman titles. Rudimentary graphics couldn’t capture the full glory of our Big Blue Boy Scout, and the limited available memory made it difficult to include any kind of sophisticated gameplay. Superman was often flying, but this power didn’t feel particularly thrilling when the player was relegated to static, flat worlds. It wasn’t until 1989’s Superman: The Man of Steel that the world started to get a glimpse of what a game worthy of the Last Son of Krypton could look like. Sections with overhead vertical scrolling imbued flying with a sense of speed and freedom.

Ensuring that flight instills awe in the player, Butler-Boschma says, is an essential element necessary for any top-of-the-line Superman game — and likely why people responded so well to his depiction in 2022.

“That sense of wonder, much like the original Christopher Reeve Superman tagline ‘You’ll believe a man can fly’ — all the best moments can be those quiet ones when Clark is flying over the city,” he says.

That aside, 1989’s big Superman game was a disjointed mishmash that was a far cry from the open-world sandboxes modern audiences expect now.

Things started ramping up for the Man of Tomorrow in 1992’s Superman for the Sega Genesis. Advances in pixel art allowed for the most lush depiction of Superman to that point, complete with bulging muscles and a flowing, graceful cape. The beat-’em-up action also offered, by far, the best combat of any Superman game at the time.

But while the more basic interactive elements started to take shape, Superman games started having to contend with the much more difficult “Superman problem.” It’s one that’s plagued all Superman creatives, and a dilemma that’s further complicated when you try and solve it via game mechanics.

Save for one key weakness, Superman is basically invulnerable. How do you make a convincing enemy or intriguing narrative hook out of that? As Butler-Boschma tells it, Superman’s might is one of the key conundrums facing any game developer who takes on a game.

“Superman can be daunting. I understand this, especially if we consider there was a time when his sneeze alone took out half a galaxy,” he says. “It’s a ludicrous power level, so how could a design team even manage that much power, while making the game fun? It’s a tough question.”

In the case of movies and comic books, the best Superman stories home in on abstract issues that would defy anyone regardless of what powers they have. Think about things like relationships, family, or history. In these stories, villains and threats may abound, but they aren’t necessarily the reasons people tune in.

But in a modern AAA video game, which is expected to provide dozens of hours of gameplay, “action” is the verb of preference. This reality isn’t necessarily incompatible with telling a story; Marvel’s Spider-Man threads this needle ingeniously. Spider-Man fights hundreds of foes throughout the course of the experience, but notably, he never kills anyone. Instead, enemies are often shown tied up in webs, which keep them tight until the police arrive. A clever game could theoretically come up with something similar so that Superman could fight many people without compromising his morals, but so far, it’s a puzzle nobody has solved — including the team behind the last big-budget game, 2006’s Superman Returns.

It may be surprising to skip over Superman 64 and Titus Interactive, given its notorious fumble with bringing the hero to life. But the reality is that the issues at the heart of Superman 64 are ordinary, especially when it comes to licensed games. Eric Caen, a producer on the game, once noted in an interview that Titus often found itself fighting against brand restrictions imposed by DC. Superman was not, for example, to be shown fighting real people. The back and forth to get things approved, meanwhile, complicated what was already an overly ambitious vision for the game. “It is not even 10% of what we intended to do, but the licensor killed us,” Caen said in 2011. This sort of IP quandary is so common that we’ve only started to see exceptions to the rules in recent years. “I don’t think it is easy to deliver even a portion of players’ expectations, and we were probably too ambitious and a bit presumptuous at that time… but its terrible reputation is exaggerated mainly because Superman is an icon!” Caen contended.

Returns had similar stumbles, but they had less to do with the larger brand and more to do with unrealistic expectations of meeting the classic Superman problem. At the time, EA signed on to make the game to release in tandem with the 2006 movie. A publisher with EA’s resources likely seemed like a good match for something like Superman, but things went awry before development even began. For whatever reason, EA decided to put the game on the shoulders of EA Tiburon, a studio that, up until that point, was largely known for making Madden. Suddenly, Tiburon was expected to make the world’s first open-world Superman game.

Few things went according to plan. The studio threw too many artists at the project, who produced a film’s worth of cinematics for the game — only for it to be released with 15 minutes of said footage. Worse, because the movie wasn’t out yet, the team had little to work off of. WB initially declined to share the script out of fear of leaks. When Tiburon finally got a copy, it was a single script that the entire studio had to share until WB took it with them at the end of their meetings together. It was a production nightmare that was worsened by the fact that the film didn’t have much action to begin with. Never mind that DC was stringent about Superman’s brand, urging the studio that it could not create anything that implied Superman was, at any point, hurting innocent civilians.

“You have to build scenarios where it’s rewarding to be good,” Dana Kurtin, the person behind DC’s brand strategy, said in a 2017 Polygon story that detailed what went wrong with the game’s development. “Most video games are about being rewarded for kicking the shit out of everything.”

Despite all these hurdles, Superman Returns did have a glimmer of ingenuity to it. In the game, Superman is naturally invincible — but the city itself isn’t.

“It’s hard to remember which things Superman Returns did well, as the dev cycle was so plagued by changes in direction and a lot of things were done so last minute,” says Laura Davila, an environmental artist who worked on Superman Returns. “However I do think the game did a relatively decent job of making you feel super — you as Superman were quite literally in charge of Metropolis’s health, and it felt super cool to fly so fast. The game also had some fairly fun sandbox elements such as being able to take the Daily planet globe and throw it like a giant baseball. The city felt huge, and had to be huge in order to incorporate Superman’s super speed.”

Despite this approach to the video game version of the Superman problem, the game fell short of expectations. An IGN review called it the best Superman game yet — but also one of the most disappointing ones. In a way, it was a sentiment shared by the very people who made the game.

“I can’t help but miss the game it was imagined to be in the beginning. […] It was much more comic-styled and incorporated a lot of unique elements and enemies before WB had us pivot the vision of the game to fit more with the movie,” Davila says.

While nothing has been announced regarding another attempt at making a Superman game work, there’s some cause for hope. There’s a Superman movie on the horizon, which is coinciding with WB’s push to maximize the video game presence of its properties. In the wake of Hogwarts Legacy’s massive success, the company knows that creating a good video game that captures the spirit of a brand can be lucrative. Plus, it’s not as if Superman has been completely absent from the world of games, as evidenced by appearances in recent games like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (which, notably, did not match Hogwarts Legacy’s success).

So while the appetite may be there, it might also be a while before anyone delivers the ultimate Superman game experience. Even James Gunn, who is directing the upcoming film, admits that for years, he was wary of taking on a character as storied as Superman. And as tempting as it is to point to Marvel’s successful stewardship of superhero games, a theoretical Superman game would be on a totally different playing field. Insomniac Games, for instance, has been making Spider-Man games since 2014 — and even then, it built upon what other studios had been doing for decades prior — to the point that its games now act as technical showcases that validate the purchases of expensive gaming consoles. That means that the latest video game iteration of Peter Parker has a significant head start over a studio attempting to solve the Superman problem.

Superman inherently would be held to a different standard, especially after such a prolonged absence and a history of failures. And unlike many Marvel superheroes, Superman’s legend is synonymous with American identity. The stakes of any high-profile depiction of Superman are almost impossibly high.

“I think a truly spectacular Superman game would have to nail that delicate tonal balance of feeling super strong, but also be able to get down to a regular human’s level and make the player really care about protecting the average citizen,” Davila says. “They would have to construct a world that doesn’t feel arbitrarily huge, but still feels massive enough for someone like Superman to play around in. Perhaps it’s just never going to be possible with anything other than an on-the-rails experience but maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps in this day and age we can craft a sandbox experience that can account for all the destruction necessary for a big Superman battle, but still have a lot of intimate, cinematic moments. Who knows?”