Remembering Batman’s Worst Console Game
And the people who still speedrun it
The year is 1995, and the Chicago Tribune has dubbed this summer as “the golden age of movie marketing and product merchandising.” The biggest marketing hit, the newspaper says, is Batman Forever, which can be “seen on magazine covers, on U2 music videos, on TV commercials, on entertainment news programs and, most prominently, on millions of glass mugs distributed at McDonald's.” Surely, you remember the mugs, one of the enduring images of the 1990s and the power duo of the Golden Arches and Hollywood. The blitz works, as the film is the first to gross $20 million in a day, but not all of its ancillary products were hits.
Video games, of course, were part of the Batman Forever tie-in effort. The primary console systems of the day, Super NES and Genesis, carried the beat 'em up based on the film—along with PC and Game Boy versions, among others. Developer Acclaim had motion capture technology that was cutting-edge for the time, and Warner Bros. acquired it for the film before it was used to create the sprites you see in the game. (If you looked under the hood, you may recognize the engine as the same one used for Mortal Kombat II.)
It wasn't met with positive reviews. Those digitized sprites were one of the few things praised by publications like Next Generation, which otherwise decried the controls and high difficulty of the game. The wonderful Crappy Games Wiki recounts the button agility required: “In the SNES version, for instance, to pull yourself up to certain areas with the grappling hook, you must press Select slightly before you press Up. To jump down from certain ledges, you press Down and R, but R must be held before pressing Down. If you press buttons at the same time, you just only jump or crouch."
They actually made you use the Select button as part of the combination to activate the grappling hook, which is still bizarre. But the most frustrating thing I remember about it was how the game’s SNES booklet was completely wrong about how to utilize the Cape Morph: It says you must press A multiple times while holding L, when the former button should actually be Y. Good thing I had literally hours to kill at 9 years old to figure this out.
But like many other unlikely games, the speedrunning community has continued to pursue the quickest time possible to beat this difficult and goofy game. The most recent world record on Speedrun.com, in fact, was just last year (you know, 27 years after it was released). User Faustt4712 beat it on the Genesis in 34 minutes and 8 seconds—at “any%”, which means simply getting to the end, no matter what’s been otherwise unlocked.
Yes, I watched all 34 minutes and 8 seconds myself. My favorite speedrun of this game however, and I can’t believe I’ve now watched two of them, is the one YouTube user TheSuperSNES' SNES any%. Robin speedrun (40 minutes and 14 seconds). His commentary version is immensely enlightening (in the most unlikely way), with a ton of insight into what both makes it a bad game and how to exploit some of its quirks. "It turns out there's much, much, much more wrong in this game than the controls,” he says, about a game he’s likely spent hours and hours on to get it down this fast.
Two key things I forgot about the game until I rewatched these: 1) The fact that Schumacher’s Gotham actually comes through quite nicely in the game’s backdrops and 2) Each of the characters in the game, down to every single thug, has a unique moniker (likely made just to have its energy bar match the hero’s). You can tell the developers’ ideas for names began to sputter after nearly a dozen, with hundreds to go. Many, like Titan or Warlock, sound like American Gladiators; others sound like the makers’ friends and peers. But to end this newsletter, I’d like to share my favorites. Yes, these are real:
Anglophile
Blood Fire
Cuddles
Custard
Evildoer
Tough Tony
Wobbler
Hooter
Dreamstorm
and Dawg
