Where Is The 'Batman V Superman' Video Game?

Batman v Superman is a movie being screened in theaters right now. Is it a good movie? No. Should we even call it a movie? Let’s fight about it on Twitter. Is it making more money than God? You bet. Mysteriously missing from the BvS paraphernalia is a punch-up video game, which seems like a no brainer.

Even movies like Hardcore Henry have them now. And famously, movies like The Dark Knight have been denied game tie-ins, despite economists fuming about the loss. So where the hell is a BvS tie-in game? And for that matter, where are all the Zack Snyder tie-in games? Let’s explore.

First, The Bat has had a terrible video game history, until the creators of the very recent Arkham series thought, “What if we made the World’s Greatest Detective into one of those, I don’t know…detectives?”

Supes however, has never had a single good title put out with his face on it. There’ve been titles dating back to Atari, but if you want to get an achievement for literally saving cats out of trees, pick up the Xbox 360 version of We’re Still Trying To Figure Out Superman.

If you want to have some idea of how bad it can get, take a look at this travesty:

Oof. I played that garbage fire, and all the rest of the Superman games. Superman Returns made me break a controller. That’s how infuriating that entry is.

So, for a match-up that Hollywood has been trying to force for twenty-plus years, where’s the game for this loud, dark, extremely popular movie?

Here’s a fan-edit combining footage from multiple games to show you what we might be angling for here:

And here’s a twist: there’s a game. It’s a browser game. And it’s not worth your time, because it is garbage marketing nonsense without any return on the clicks you put in. But check it out here if you’re looking to feel pain or something.

Yeah. Nothing there. It’s less exciting than the DLC to drive the BvS Batmobile inside Arkham Knight. You don’t tease fans with a big Superman tie-in and then give us a skin for a car. This is Horse Armor level nonsense.

The team behind the Arkham games for Batman have promised they are done with The Dark Knight, so what if that means a Superman game is next? An IMDB entry about Superman VO was quickly removed from the page for Arkham Knight, suggesting something was probably recorded. Rocksteady Studios is also famous for dropping big hints about their next game, which could weigh in on this.

Which might be fantastic. If anyone could crack the Kyptonian gameplay, it would be Rocksteady. They could improve upon the place where others have fallen, including this open world escapade that looked fantastic but got crippled by the Powers That Be. Check out another of Unseen64’s fantastic pieces below.

But again, where’s the game for this? And where is the game for all the other Zack Snyder properties? Dawn of the Dead begged and screamed for an interactive adaptation and Watchmen demanded it, to say nothing of Sucker Punch. And there’s the rub: why would anyone make video games out of movies that are already video games?

DotD features a sequence of double-wielding gaming while being dragged through a sewer that read more Halo than Romero. Sucker Punch is just the cheat codes version of cinema. And having seen BvS I don’t know what else there is to explore. Zack Snyder might be the first director in history that does so much Let’s Play style action, video game developers are at a loss for what to add.

Should this movie have a game? From a money stand-point: sure. Narratively? Aw, who cares. That, unfortunately, has never decided things like this in the past. What could have been here? Maybe a game that alternated chapters between Bats and Supes, just like Arkham started trading Bats and Catwoman. Could we have a Street Fighter style between mission mini-game where we just punch the crap out of Lex Luthor? GIVE ME THIS. IF THERE IS A GOD, LET ME HAVE THIS.

As proof of the Snyderification Block of tie-ins, I offer up the arcade budget title Watchmen: The End Is Nigh, which gives players the opportunity to spend a couple hours in a brawl-based version of Alan Moore’s universe. It’s awful. I spent $40 to hit people as a bad rip-off Batman and it was boring and hard and tied-into nothing. It was far more boring than watching the most boring part of the movie, which began after the cool opening credits sequence and ended when I found myself weeping in my car.

The game has two meters. One for “health” and the other for “rage” if you needed any further explanation of how baddumb this is.

So where is the BvS game? Probably dead. Probably some developer’s nightmare that we’ll hear about when they get dissolved in two years. Probably crushed by a man who hates having his creative toes stepped upon. Probably not worth being sad about.

Probably.

Until then, we’ll always have Injustice: Gods Among Us and these dumb punchy possibilities.