The Lost Superman PS1 Game You Never Got To Play
In 1999, Titus Interactive released Superman for the Nintendo 64, which would later come to be dubbed as Superman 64.
Superman 64 was immediately met with a ton of negative feedback, and is considered one of the worst superhero games of all time. The game was glitchy, the controls were horrendous, the graphics were subpar and unfinished — it was a video game disaster. A port/remake called Superman: The New Adventures was set to release for the PlayStation in 2000, but the project never made it that far. The failure of the Nintendo 64 version of the Superman game played a pivotal role in the unreleased PlayStation port of the game.
Superman and video games have gone hand in hand since the beginning phases of gaming. Specifically, the character was first adapted as a game for Atari 2600's Superman. It's no surprise that the video game lost traction with so much negative feedback. The franchise had been such a fan favorite. So what exactly happened to the PlayStation port?
They didn't have the rights
The PlayStation port of Superman was actually a completely different game from the original Nintendo 64 version. The game simply couldn't be directly ported to the PlayStation — there were too many hardware limitations. So BlueSky, a branch of Titus, was set on correcting the previous version's mistakes. BlueSky started from scratch and reworked the game to be fully functional. Gone were the wonky controls and rushed programming. According to some reports, the game showed a lot of promise.
BlueSky and Titus had supposedly completed about 90% of the PlayStation port. Unfortunately for Titus, the Warner Bros license expired and was never renewed. The game was finally completed, but the studio didn't have the authorization to put the game on the shelves. The game was cancelled, and would be lost for decades.
Superman: The Adventures of Superman (The PlayStation port) was temporarily available online for public access on DeviantArt. Unfortunately, the link to the download seems to have disappeared. However, a number of curious Superman fans probably downloaded the title before it was taken down, so it's out there somewhere.