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A new video from Did You Know Gaming?
explores the existence of a promising new Superman title that was meant to release alongside a Superman Returns sequel.
With just one week remaining until the release of Zack Synder’s Batman Vs Superman film’s release, it was always likely that we’d see a lot of new content released about the iconic heroes. Now, in a new video from, the team explored footage from a cancelled Superman title that we could have seen launched on the previous generation of consoles.
Based on a planned sequel to 2006’s Superman Returns , which coincidentally would have been named Man of Steel , company Factor 5 began development of a title featuring the last son of Krypton himself. The game was aimed to release around the same time as the movie would have, though it suffered from some delays when director Bryan Singer took a break from the franchise to work on World War 2 title Valkyrie . Unfortunately, as Singer finally returned to make the Superman Returns sequel, Warner Brothers told him that they were no longer interested in the franchise, choosing instead to reboot the Superman movies several years down the line.
The video by the Did You Know Gaming team shows off some of the test footage that the open-world game (codenamed Blue Steel) had finished, including a battle with Doomsday that involved the Man of Steel grappling the villain through a dynamically rendered building. It was hoped that all buildings would be fully destructible in this way, though the development team was a long way off this goal. Factor 5 also wanted the game to have a multiplayer mode, featuring other playable heroes such as Supergirl, though this too went hugely unexplored. The video also shows off some of the concept art of Supermanhimself, as well as some of the game’s vast array of villains.
While the aim was to push the PS3 hardware to its limits, Factor 5 also wanted to port the title to both Xbox 360 and Wii. Several developers have since admitted that the Wii version would have had to be considerably simplified, but the company was a huge fan of the hardware and wished to attempt the port anyway. When publishers Brash Entertainment began to fall to bankruptcy in 2008, Factor 5 was forced to close its doors due to no new publishers wanting to come on board, leaving the promising-sounding title dead in its tracks.
These days, while many fans dream of a Arkham Asylum -esque title featuring the Man of Steel, the only way we can play a modern title as the hero is through the use of Superman-based modsfor games such as GTA 5 . One YouTuber even went as far as to recreate the Batman Vs Superman trailer, using nothing but footage from the latest Grand Theft Auto title.
Looking back over the past few years, we’ve seen a lack of superhero titles released, which is likely due to a lack of faith in the titles by developers. The only real success that a company has had in recent times is Rocksteady’s Arkham series. Now with a complete Batman trilogy under the company’s belt, many believe that the team should tackle a Superman title, in an attempt to replicate the success it had with the caped crusader. However, there are also many reasons that lead us to believe that Rocksteady should not make the change to Superman.
In other Batman news, Telltale games has announced that its new Batman project will release this summer. Being an ever-popular character, Batman seems to get all the love from developers, but we’re not going to complain about too much of a bad thing, just so long as the game doesn’t suffer from the same amount of issues as Arkham Knight .
What would you like to see in a new Superman title? Leave us a comment and let us know.