Superman: The New Superman Adventures · Nintendo 64 · 1999 · Impact: Routinely cited among the worst games ever made
Superman 64 buried its hero in a thick fog and forced players through repetitive "fly through the rings" challenges hampered by broken controls, unreliable collision, and a punishing timer. It became one of the most notorious examples of a licensed game ruined by technical failure.
Released for the Nintendo 64 in 1999, the Superman game commonly known as Superman 64 set players loose in a Metropolis smothered by dense fog. The fog was widely understood to be a workaround for the hardware struggling to render the city, and it reduced visibility so severely that flying — the core fantasy of playing Superman — became a chore of squinting through haze. Much of the game consisted of flying through floating rings against a strict time limit, an objective justified by a thin story about Lex Luthor trapping Superman in a virtual reality, repeated to the point of tedium. The execution compounded the dull premise. Controls were imprecise, collision detection with the rings and environment was unreliable, and the timer left little room for the mistakes the loose handling encouraged. Bugs and design failures reinforced each other, producing a frustrating experience that critics savaged on release and that has been a fixture of "worst games of all time" lists ever since. Superman 64 became shorthand for how a beloved licence and capable hardware can still yield a broken, joyless game when the underlying technology and design fall short.
The defining image of Superman 64 is the fog. Believed to be a means of limiting how much of Metropolis the Nintendo 64 had to draw at once, it left the city as a grey haze that the player flies through with little sense of place or speed. For a game whose appeal is soaring over a vibrant city as Superman, obscuring that city undercut the entire premise.
Layered on top was the ring-flying objective: steer Superman through a sequence of floating hoops before a timer expires. On its own a forgettable mechanic, it became the backbone of the game and was repeated relentlessly. Combined with imprecise flight controls and collision that often failed to register a clean pass through a ring, the central activity was as frustrating as it was monotonous.
Superman 64 is frequently held up as proof that a strong licence guarantees nothing. The character and the platform were both capable of supporting a good game, but technical limitations and uninspired design produced the opposite. Reviewers at the time were scathing, and the game has remained a permanent entry on worst-ever lists in the decades since.
Its notoriety made it a kind of negative landmark: a reference invoked whenever a high-profile licensed game disappoints. The game's failures — the fog, the rings, the controls — are specific enough to remember and broad enough to symbolise a whole category of squandered potential, which is why Superman 64 endures in gaming memory long after better games of its era were forgotten.