History of the X-MEN games By GameSpot

By Doug Trueman
Designed By Katie Bush

The Beginning

X-Men
System: NES
Developer: LJN
Publisher: LJN
Release Date: 1988

Just as the X-Men have been around much longer than most people realize, so too have the video games that are based on them. The first X-Men title to come out for a home system was called The Uncanny X-Men, which was for the original Nintendo Entertainment System. In this isometrically viewed vertical scroller, you have six X-Men to choose from: Cyclops, Wolverine, Storm, Colossus, Iceman, or Nightcrawler. You have to create a team of two and attempt to make it to the other side of an incredibly ugly background. One character is controlled by the CPU and will inevitably die after being hit enough times by spheres of energy or blobs that wear glasses. If your character dies first, you will assume control of your character's partner. Once both characters are dead (usually within a minute or so), you have to create another team from your remaining four X-Men and then send them to be slaughtered. After that team dies an ignoble death, only one pair remains. Finally, with the death of your last two X-Men, the game will end. Out of all the games in the history of X-Men, this is by far the worst, by most accounts. Even if you're into retrogaming, skip this title. Heck, even the 1960s X-Men didn't deserve anything this bad.

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Look closely and you can see Iceman squaring off against a bespectacled blob.

 

Wolverine
System: NES
Developer: Software Creations
Publisher: LJN
Release Date: 1991

This title, Wolverine, deserves to meet a fate similar to the hundreds of Atari E.T. cartridges that ended up buried in the New Mexico desert. Barely identifiable as either human or X-Men, the sprite you controlled jumped around tiny platforms, punching at snowball-throwing ghosts. Using Wolverine's claws (you'd enable them with the Select button) drained him of his health, making the claws more of a burden than an asset. The ghosts would often materialize right on top of Wolverine, sucking his life away and causing him a near instant death. The graphics were ugly, the sounds were ugly, and the gameplay was deplorable. It's hard to imagine that Marvel licensed the X-Men for this title. The only positive side to this monstrosity was the "Game Over" sign that couldn't come quickly enough.

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X-Men: Madness in Murderworld
System: Commodore 64, IBM PC (DOS)
Developer: Paragon Software
Publisher: MicroProse
Release Date: 1989

Madness in Murderworld carries the honor of being the first X-Men game to appear on personal computers. Developed by Paragon Software, the game pits the X-Men against series villain Arcade, who has kidnapped Professor X. As the title implies, the X-Men must make their way through Murderworld, Arcade's ghastly carnival of death. The game contains six playable characters: Wolverine, Cyclops, Storm, Colossus, Nightcrawler, and Dazzler. The characters can all use their signature powers to win battles and solve puzzles, which lends an element of strategy to the gameplay. Madness in Murderworld includes a short X-Men comic, available only with the game, which sets up the storyline.

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X-Men II: Fall of the Mutants
System: IBM PC (DOS)
Developer: Paragon Software
Publisher: MicroProse
Release Date: 1990

X-Men II brings about changes to the gameplay that were established in the first game. This time, the action is presented from an overhead perspective, and there really isn't much action to speak of anyway. The game lets you build a team of five X-Men from a pool of 15 and then lets you lead that team through a maze filled with traps and enemies. X-Men characters still retain their trademark powers, but there isn't so much use for them, given the slow, somewhat strategic gameplay. The game follows the "Fall of the Mutants" storyline, a crossover that's featured in the Uncanny X-Men, X-Factor, and New Mutants comics.

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Look closely and you can see Iceman squaring off against a bespectacled blob.

 

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X-Men 16-bit

Spider-Man/X-Men in Arcade's Revenge
Systems: Game Gear, Game Boy, SNES, Genesis
Developer: Software Creations
Publisher: LJN
Release Date: 1992

This game hit several platforms when it was released in the early 1990s. It was a generic platformer that told the tale of Arcade, a sinister villain who had caught and imprisoned several of the X-Men (Cyclops, Storm, Wolverine, and Gambit). You had to run around a two-dimensional maze, avoiding spikes, laser fire, robots, and more. You had to start off playing as Spidey, but once you found his fellow Marvel characters, you could play as any of them for the rest of the game. Unfortunately, this game suffered from what is somewhat of a theme for the games in this feature: a limitation on innate abilities.

Because of the limitations on the characters' abilities (for instance, Storm had limited use of her powers, and Gambit quickly ran out of cards), fans of X-Men games felt they'd been ripped off, and rightly so. The title not only played, but sold poorly as well. Only play or purchase this X-Men game if you're a huge X-Men fan; otherwise, run far, far away. The screens are from the SNES version.

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X-Men (Six-Player Arcade)
System: Arcade
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
Release Date: 1992

One of the first arcade titles that proved how successful an X-Men video game franchise could be was this six-player side-scrolling beat-'em-up by Konami. You could play as Cyclops, Colossus, Storm, Wolverine, Nightcrawler, or Dazzler (an odd decision on Konami's part, as Dazzler was not a popular character to begin with). Although this game never reached its full potential, it still had several things going for it: The animations were smooth, the sounds were terrific, and a never-ending line of Sentinels was just waiting for you to smash them to pieces (knocking one down with Wolverine, mounting the fallen body, and then clawing it to pieces is still a fond memory for most). There were the usual end bosses - other mutants who had joined with Magneto ("Nothing moves the Blob") - and various other traps, like mines and lasers, to drain your energy. Unfortunately, the biggest fallback for this title was that using an X-Men's mutant ability (like Cyclops' Optic Blast) to clear the screen of opponents and obstacles took away a substantial percentage of your health. You could do this until you had no health left, and then you could use an energy sphere that your character kept in storage. After that, you were pretty much dead. Despite this shortcoming, this title was still a large success and can be found in various arcades today.

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X-Men
System: Genesis
Developer: Sega
Publisher: Sega
Release Date: 1993

The predecessor to what would be one of the best X-Men titles to come out found its way to the Sega Genesis in 1993. Although this was billed as a two-player game, playing as such took an incredible amount of coordination, so the title was most enjoyable played solo. You had to choose one of four selectable X-Men (Gambit, Nightcrawler, Cyclops, and Wolverine) and fight your way through a 2D side-scrolling platformer, defeating minions of Magneto. If things got nasty, you could summon one of four backup X-Men (Rogue, Archangel, Iceman, and Storm) to help out for a moment - usually a critical one. Storm could clear the screen in a huge blast of lighting, Iceman could make a bridge to places otherwise inaccessible, and the other characters had a similar sweeping move. The powers of the various characters were somewhat innate in this title: Below the health bar was an X bar that measured what percentage of your character's powers you could still use. The bar slowly recharged over time, but there were still problems with it. For example, if Wolverine extended his claws, his bar would slowly drain until he was forced to retract them. But on the whole, this game made good on its use of the X-Men license (little touches like Jean Grey telekinetically saving you from a bottomless pit were cool).

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But then there was the ending. And here comes a spoiler, so don't read this unless you've already seen it or you don't care if it's spoiled! At the end of the second-to-last level, the screen filled up with computer screens featuring Professor Xavier's face, begging you to "reset the computer." A timer quickly counted down, and you were utterly baffled as to what to do next. Failure to do anything meant the end of the game. What Xavier actually meant was for you to reset your Sega Genesis. If you did so, the screen would go blank, then run strings of binary code (1s and 0s, Matrix style), and then the final level, Asteroid M, would load.

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This was perhaps one of the most pigheaded schemes a game developer had ever come up with because most players naturally assumed that resetting the machine would reset the entire game. Many gamers complained and declared that their cartridges were faulty, and likewise, many independent stores had no idea how to solve the problem. As EGM put it in its review of the game seven years ago, "Whoever came up with that idea of resetting the Genesis to load the last level should be killed." Don't mess with die-hards.

Portable X-Men

X-Men
System: Game Gear
Developer: Sega
Publisher: Sega
Release Date: 1993

This was the first of a trilogy of lukewarm titles for the Game Gear. You chose one of several X-Men and made your way through two stages, attacking enemies who simply stood and shot at you. The levels were long and monotonous, and the graphics and sound were hideous, even for the Game Gear. Like in the other X-Men games that failed to properly deal with the X-Men's innate ability,, the characters in X-Men on the Game Gear were governed by a power meter that you had to recharge by finding rotating circles in the environments, though powers in this game could be toggled on and off. The thought of Rogue having to actively decide to fly was absurd, and the fact that a relatively invincible girl, who could flip a Sentinel with her bare hands, needed four or more punches to take out a simple goon was equally preposterous. Health was recovered by acquiring the most clichéd of icons: pulsing hearts.

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X-Men: Gamemaster's Legacy
System: Game Gear
Developer: Sega
Publisher: Sega
Release Date: 1994

X-Men: Gamemaster's Legacy was an exact copy of the previous title, except for minor cosmetic, level, and character differences. Apparently the first Game Gear X-Men game sold well enough to warrant the development of an equally poor sequel, and this was it. If you've played the first game, you've played this one.

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X-Men: Mojo World
System: Game Gear
Developer: Sega
Publisher: Sega
Release Date: 1996

Two years after the release of Gamemaster's Legacy came X-Men: Mojo World. Like in the previous Game Gear titles, innate character abilities were dealt with in a bizarre fashion: They could be toggled on and off. There is no difference between this game and the first two, save for minor cosmetic changes and the variety of X-Men who were selectable from the start.

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X-Men: Super NES vs. Genesis

X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse
System: Super NES
Developer: Capcom
Publisher Capcom
Release Date: 1994

X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse is a fairly standard, Final Fight-esque side scroller. In the game, you had to choose from Beast, Cyclops, Gambit, Psylocke, and Wolverine. Special abilities were not only innate in this game but were also required. Normal punch and kick combos would only get you so far, but nothing was better for wiping out the screen than an Optic Blast or Tornado Claw. You drew on the X-Men's special abilities by performing standard Capcom motions on the controller, such as the fireball or dragon punch. While this game had smooth graphics and sound, it suffered from minor (OK, major) problems in the gameplay department. Getting hit by a crony resulted in far too much damage, considering the length of the levels and the difficulty settings of the mini and end bosses. Too often the X-Men would find themselves stunned by a hit and then get pummeled from both sides until they hit the ground. But other than that, it was still an entertaining and challenging title. Too bad Wolverine didn't heal as he progressed.

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Wolverine: Adamantium Rage
System: Genesis
Developer: Teeny Weeny
Publisher: Acclaim
Release Date: 1994

Acclaim has made and published some bad games, but Wolverine: Adamantium Rage is actually quite a good title for a company historically known for buying up various licenses and then not making good on the product. A sample level of Adamantium Rage had the X-Men escaping from a lab experiment gone awry. Wolverine had to defend himself against hovering gun pods and robots during his escape, all the while tripping switches to open doors and suffering flashbacks of previous battles. Making things more interesting was the inclusion of panicking white-coated technicians whom you could choose to ignore or slash to pieces. This game took Wolverine's mutant abilities seriously. There were no power-ups to rejuvenate his mutant gifts, because they never decreased in power or status. He could spike his claws into walls to climb them, lunge with claws extended to get a jump on a gun-toting enemy, and perform various jumping attacks. And Wolverine's inherent healing factor was also significant, as he was constantly recovering health at a rate of about one percent every two seconds (sure, it was also possible to fight up until near-death status, then go hide out in a corner somewhere and return at full strength). The developers at Teeny Weeny got around this rejuvenation trick by making the level bosses very damaging, so as to not give Wolverine as much time to recover himself and then giving him nowhere to hibernate in order to recover fully. This is an early example of an X-Men game done right.

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X-Men 2: Clone Wars
System: Genesis
Developer: Headgames
Publisher: Sega
Release Date: 1995

X-Men 2: Clone Wars was the second of the Genesis X-Men titles and was one of the first to take the characters for who they were and place them in a consistent universe. The story was straight out of the books: the Techno-Organic creatures known as the Phalanx had been creating clones in the hopes of (what else?) overthrowing Earth. Naturally, they were looking for as much material as they could get their hands on, so they planned to invade a Sentinel factory and assimilate it. The game was a run, jump, and attack side-scroller where Beast, Cyclops, Gambit, Nightcrawler, Psylocke, and Wolverine would beat up various Phalanx and their clones in an attempt to prevent global assimilation. The graphics were solid, and the controls were ideal, and though the gameplay was somewhat repetitive (find your way around a two-dimensional maze), this game was a success with X-Men fans because the developers at Headgames understood what the X-Men were about. The characters' abilities were available to you at all times (instead of you having to acquire them through power-ups), and little things that purists would instantly pick up on were quite noticeable: Wolverine could hang from walls and ceilings by striking them with his claws, and Psylocke's sai could damage humans and robots, while her psyonic blade was useless against anything metallic. It's the attention to the vast X-Men mythology that makes this title stand out.

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X-Women
System: Genesis
Developer: Clockwork Tortoise
Publisher: Sega
Projected Release Date: Late 1996 (never released)

X-Women was a standard side-scrolling action game starring the X-Men's better halves. The plot involved the male X-Men contracting a mysterious virus, and so Rogue, Storm, Psylocke, and Jubilee had to brawl through several stages in order to cure them. X-Women was in development well after the Saturn and the PlayStation had begun gaining ground, so it's not surprising that it was cancelled when Sega quit the 16-bit market entirely.

X-Men
System: Sega Genesis 32X
Developer: Sega
Publisher: Sega
Projected Release Date: 1995 (never released)

Less is known about this title than about Wolverine's true origin. All that we could scrape up was that it possibly starred Wolverine, Rogue, and Bishop. But it never saw the light of day. Considering the problems that Sega was having at the time, frankly, we're not surprised. It was demoed at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in 1995, but that was the last anyone ever saw of it.

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X-Men Mutant Academy
System: N64
Developer: TBA Software
Publisher: Activision
Projected Release Date: July 2000 (never released)

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The X-Men Mutant Academy fighting game was to be released on the PlayStation and the N64, but only the PlayStation version made it to life. Read the details on the shipped PlayStation version later in this feature.

 

X-Men
System: PC
Developer: Digital Lobster
Publisher: Marvel Interactive (Marvel was considering game publishing at the time)
Projected Release Date: Never announced and quickly canceled.

Once upon a time, Marvel Comics had the notion that a PC game based on the X-Men might help the once-floundering company. GameSpot got in touch with Tim Coman, a developer on the title, and he wistfully told us how he had envisioned the PC title.

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"We originally pitched the idea to Marvel Interactive a few years back. This was right at the time they were declaring bankruptcy. The idea as we pitched it would have included most of the mainstay characters: Cyclops, Wolverine, Storm, Colossus, Phoenix, Professor X, plus tons of hidden characters. The basic premise was that you'd be able to switch between characters. [For example, you'd meet] Sunfire and he'd join your group, not unlike a power-up. You'd then have the ability to switch to using him, complete a specific task, and then switch back. The view on the game was three-quarters down. We went with high-res prerendered characters moving over a continuous background. Our original idea was to base levels on the Claremont/Byrne run of the comics.

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"We wanted to have each of the levels lead to the next, [like the series]. We might have started in the Savage Land where the player would meet up with Kazar then progress to Proteus, Murderworld, the White Queen Saga, ending with the Phoenix vs. Imperial Guard on the Moon. We thought it might be cool to have sublevels with subplots like the comic, like having Wolvie fight a bunch of Ninjas sent by his girlfriend's father, [but] Marvel was more interested in having just the Apocalypse storyline featured. Another idea we bounced back and forth was to have add-on packs of characters that you could plug into the game. [For example], if you wanted to buy Havok as a main character you could purchase just that character and load him in. We talked about being able to download him off the Internet as well. We had also talked about having continuing sagas, so you could buy the next saga instead of having the complete game come out all at once. [We thought of selling] the game in installments and having the option of buying the whole game after the whole series came out [like] the trade paperback model of releasing comics. We spent some amount of time on the engine [and eventually] we had Wolverine and Storm moving around. We included the Brood as enemies you could fight against. These were at a rough stage of development but possibly of interest to fans of X-Men."

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It's a shame this title never made it past the development stage, but with Marvel having some financial difficulties at this time, it doesn't come as much of a surprise. Maybe in the future. Below are some shots of the game in its early development stages, taken before the ax fell.

X-Men Meet Capcom

Marvel Super Heroes: War of the Gems
System: Super NES
Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom
Release Date: 1996

Released shortly before Capcom began its onslaught (sorry) of Marvel-based 2D fighters was War of the Gems for the Super NES. Like in the arcade fighter Marvel Super Heroes, which followed quickly after, you chose one of several characters from the Marvel universe to stop Thanos from acquiring the six infinity gems from a powerful gauntlet. Giving a character a gem imparted him with special abilities (more damage, more speed, etc). Having a gem let you perform special super moves (like a screen-clearing blast), and you could find power-ups that you could save and use on the character-selection screen to restore dead heroes or increase your character's health meters. Many of the animations from these titles have been carried over to the 2D fighters that Capcom released in the arcade soon afterward, such as Wolverine's Tornado Claw and Captain America's storehouse of shield moves. Of the many games on our list, this one barely managed to meet our stringent requirements: Only one member of the party of five (Wolverine) actually came from the X-Men universe. Nevertheless, the War of the Gems earns a rightful spot on our mantle, if only in name and by a singular character.

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"Shoryuken!... er, Tornado Claw!"

X-Men: Children of the Atom
Systems: Arcade, PlayStation, Saturn, PC
Developer: Capcom (Arcade/Console), Probe Entertainment (PC)
Publisher: Capcom (Arcade/Console), Acclaim (PC)
Release Date: 1996

X-Men: Children of the Atom was a massive arcade smash when it first came out. It was one of the first Capcom arcade games to contain basically the Street Fighter 2 engine overhauled to make the game appear new.X-Men: Children of the Atom was an arcade smash when it first came out. The game featured 12 of the X-Men's strongest heroes and villains - Colossus, Cyclops, Iceman, Omega Red, Psylocke, a Sentinel, Silver Samurai, Spiral, Storm, Wolverine, Juggernaut, Magneto, and Akuma (as a secret character) - and Capcom made good on its promise to Marvel that it could handle an arcade fighter better than any other developer. Colorful graphics, tech hits, dizzy meters, dynamic backgrounds, rock-solid control and gameplay, and a giant "X" that flashed on the screen whenever someone unleashed a super combo all helped this title suck in quarter after quarter. Each character featured his or her powers as a special move (and wasn't limited to sacrificing health bars as in the Konami side scroller), as well as a gigantic super combo that inflicted serious quantities of block damage. Many fondly remember using Cyclops' Optic Bullet followed instantly by an Optic Blast to annoy opponents, and if you found yourself facing a skilled Sentinel, you knew that the sheer variety of attacks it could unleash (rocket punches, double foot sweeps, deployment of mini-Sentinels to bomb the other player) was a tremendous challenge in the very least. Some argued that the gameplay wasn't as balanced as it had been in previous Capcom fighters. Colossus could double-throw people, depleting half of their life bar; Omega Red had a simple throw-to-magic serial combo that would dizzy opponents and could be repeated for the kill; and Wolverine's sped-up special move made you jump around like a madman, slashing away your life via block damage with almost no chance of retribution.

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Ports of this game were released on the PlayStation, Saturn, and even the PC, and while the two-player matches were fun, for some odd reason Capcom decided that the single player difficulty setting had to be extreme. Even on the easiest setting the CPU would regularly whip your butt with any character (especially Colossus) over and over until you gave up in frustration. Killing Magneto at the end was rather rough, too, as his Magnetic Shockwave attack took an extreme amount of damage, blocked or not. Little did fans know they had it easy.... Onslaught was only a few years away.

 

Marvel Super Heroes
Systems: Arcade, PlayStation, Saturn
Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom
Release Date: 1997

Marvel Super Heroes marked the beginning of Capcom's insanely complicated fighting-game era in which you could beat your opponents silly, launch them into the air, beat them silly some more, and then nail them with a devastating super attack until it was all over. In War of the Gems, you fought other heroes from Marvel comics (not necessarily just the X-Men, however) over gems from the gauntlet of Thanos, an all-powerful being. By activating the gems in battle, you could temporarily give your characters additional abilities such as increased defense, offense, healing, and speed. In single-player mode, all the gems had been acquired by the time Thanos appeared, and just in time at that. He proved to be one of the more difficult bosses Capcom had ever created.

Where this game really shone, however, was in its two-player mode. Long lines of Capcom junkies inserted quarter after quarter in hopes of smashing their friends to pieces with moves like Spider-Man's Maximum Spider, Wolverine's Berzerker Barrage, or Iron Man's Proton Cannon.

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The game's detractors complained that because there were so many individual visual aspects in the game, (flashing gem power-ups, super animations, regular character animations, and beautiful, yet psychedelic, backgrounds) it was impossible to see what was actually happening during the course of a battle. Fans of the game generally ignored such slights, while dissenters went off in search of something less chaotic. Both the PlayStation and Saturn versions of this game failed to please gamers, and while things were going to get better for fans of import Saturn games, they were only going to get worse for PlayStation owners.

X-Men vs. Street Fighter
Systems: Arcade, PlayStation, Sega Saturn (Import)
Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom
Release Date: 1997

X-Men vs. Street Fighter exploded onto the scene shortly after Marvel Super Heroes. It was far less visually intensive, though the backgrounds were still dynamic (you could fall through concrete floors and watch as a power plant caught fire, for example). This title was groundbreaking in two ways. First, it was the initial game to feature a crossover between characters Capcom had created and those from a rival company. Representing the X-Men were Cyclops, Storm, Rogue, Gambit, Wolverine, Sabretooth, Juggernaut, and Magneto, while pulling for Capcom were Ryu, Ken, Chun Li, Cammy, Dhalsim, Zangief, M. Bison, Charlie, and Akuma. Second, and one that proved to be extremely popular with fans, it included a tag-team fighting feature. You'd choose two characters per side and swap between them at the push of a button. Characters not currently engaged in battl