The rental shop on our high street had this bizarre policy where they'd put the most disappointing games right at eye level, like they were trying to trick you into a lifetime of trust issues. I remember staring at that Superman 64 box art—bright blue, cape flowing, all that heroic promise—while clutching my £3 rental fee like it was my last tenner. Should've bought a bag of chips instead. Would've been infinitely more satisfying.
You know how sometimes a game comes along that's so spectacularly awful it becomes legendary? Not legendary in a good way, mind you. Legendary like the Titanic or New Coke. Superman 64 achieved something remarkable: it made flying feel like trudgery. Think about that for a second. They took Superman—a bloke who can zip around faster than sound, punch asteroids, generally be the most overpowered character in fiction—and turned him into the world's most frustrated pizza delivery driver.
The first thing that hits you isn't the graphics, though they're rough enough to sand furniture. It's those bloody rings. Green glowing hoops floating in mid-air like some demented circus act. The game opens with Lex Luthor trapping civilians in a "virtual Metropolis," which sounds fancy until you realize it's just programmer speak for "we couldn't be bothered making a proper city." Fair enough, I suppose. The N64 was powerful for its time, but asking it to render a convincing Metropolis was like asking a Vauxhall Nova to tow a caravan up Everest.
But those rings. Christ, those rings haunted my weekends.
Flying through them should've been simple—you're Superman, after all. Point, fly, whoosh through. Done. Except the controls felt like they'd been designed by someone who'd never seen flight, let alone programmed it. The camera swung around like a drunk toddler with a camcorder. Superman himself moved with all the grace of a shopping trolley with a wonky wheel. I'd line up what looked like a perfect approach, hit the analog stick, and watch our caped hero veer off toward some invisible wall like he'd been magnetically repelled.
The collision detection was… well, calling it "collision detection" is generous. More like collision suggestion. You'd fly clean through a ring that looked dead center, only for the game to shrug and go "nah, mate, try again." Sometimes you'd clip the very edge of a hoop and it'd count. Other times you'd thread the needle perfectly and get nothing. It was like playing darts in a hurricane while wearing oven mitts.
I spent an entire Saturday trying to beat the first proper flying mission. Not the tutorial—that was bad enough—but the first real challenge where they expected you to navigate multiple rings within a time limit. My mate Dave came over, took one look at the screen, and said "this looks like someone's making Superman fly through invisible soup." He wasn't wrong. The air physics felt thick, resistant, like Superman was swimming through treacle instead of soaring through sky.
The worst part? When you did manage to complete a ring sequence, the game would sometimes reward you with—more rings. Different colored rings, maybe arranged in a slightly different pattern, but rings nonetheless. It was like being promised a five-course meal and getting served the same slice of toast five times. I started wondering if the developers had some kind of ring obsession, or maybe they'd run out of ideas after designing the first floating hoop and thought "sod it, let's just copy-paste this everywhere."
Between the flying sections, you'd occasionally get to walk around and punch things, which should've been Superman's bread and butter. Except Superman punched like he was wearing boxing gloves filled with cotton wool. Enemies would take multiple hits to go down—enemies who, canonically, should've been atomized by a casual flick of Superman's finger. It was like watching Henry Cavill arm-wrestle a particularly stubborn jam jar.
The graphics weren't helping matters. Now, I'm not one to slag off N64 visuals—I've got a soft spot for that chunky, texture-mapped aesthetic. Mario 64 looked brilliant. GoldenEye was gorgeous in its own angular way. But Superman 64 looked like it was rendered on a potato that had been left out in the rain. Character models were basic enough to make early PlayStation games look photorealistic. Textures were blurry, repetitive, and seemed to have been painted by someone using a mouse in Microsoft Paint while wearing mittens.
The sound design was equally tragic. Superman's flying noise sounded less like superheroic whooshing and more like someone hoovering in the next room. The music was forgettable—actually, I'm being kind there. It was actively bad, like elevator music composed by someone who'd never heard actual music, just had it described to them in a telegram.
But here's the thing that really got me: the game wasn't just bad, it was boring bad. Some terrible games are entertainingly awful—they're so broken or bizarre that you can laugh at them. Superman 64 was just tedious. It sucked the joy out of playing in a way that felt almost vindictive. Like someone at Titus had a personal grudge against fun itself.
I kept that rental for the full week, convinced I was missing something. Maybe there was a hidden control scheme that made flying work properly. Maybe I hadn't found the right angle for those rings. Maybe I was being too harsh on what was clearly a rushed licensed game. Spoiler alert: I wasn't. The game was genuinely, comprehensively awful from top to bottom.
Years later, I learned about the development hell behind Superman 64. Licensing restrictions, impossible deadlines, hardware limitations—all the usual suspects that turn promising projects into disasters. But knowing why something's terrible doesn't make it less terrible. It just makes you feel sorry for the people who had to ship it.
These days, Superman 64 sits in gaming history as a cautionary tale. A reminder that even the most iconic characters can't save a fundamentally broken game. It's become shorthand for disappointment, the gold standard of terrible licensed games. When people complain about modern games being buggy or unfinished, someone inevitably mentions Superman 64 and everyone nods knowingly.
I still own a copy—picked it up years later for the novelty value. Sometimes I fire it up just to remind myself how good we've got it now. Modern Superman games might not be perfect, but at least they understand that flying should feel like flying, not like operating a particularly stubborn crane.
Those green rings still give me nightmares, though.
