Footage from a canceled SNES Green Lantern game has released online, thanks to gaming historians Liam Robertson and Frank Gasking. The side-scrolling gameplay hides a surprisingly turbulent history, with many factors playing a role in the game's demise.
With a new HBO Max Green Lantern series coming soon, now is the perfect time to review how and why this game never saw the light of day. The game's developer, Ocean Software, was one of the most prominent creators of licensed games during the lifecycle of the SNES. One of its partner companies was DC Comics, for whom Ocean created games in franchises like Batman. It was through this partnership that the Green Lantern game came to be. The Green Lantern franchise has clear potential for video games; after all, it features a league of intergalactic superheroes who wield rings with reality-bending powers.
The Green Lantern game initially told an ambitious original story starring superhero Hal Jordan. Jordan would do battle with the Queen of Xaos, a planet of giant insects that had only briefly been referenced in the comics before. This gave the team room to create an exciting world and to build an elaborate combat system around Jordan's ring-based powers. Unfortunately, a combination of mandates from Ocean and DC Comics executives would ultimately doom the promising game to join the long list of unreleased SNES titles.
For one, the game struggled with being disjointed, as the game would jump between genres from level-to-level. This was standard for Ocean's development strategy, which sped up game development by having small teams separately work on different parts of a game at once. Things got even worse once the comics made the choice to have Hal Jordan become the supervillain Parallax, who would reset much of his universe through the Zero Hour comic event. The team needed to change the game to stay in continuity with the comics, which became increasingly difficult.
The studio had a small team rework the game to better adhere to the DC Comics mandates, and this is the version revealed today. This leak is a much more straightforward comic adaptation than the original Xaos concept, recreating some scenes from the comic almost word-for-word. The studio ultimately chose to simplify the gameplay, using ring powers simply as a projectile attack. Given concerns about the SNES reaching the end of its lifespan, Ocean ultimately canceled the project, and Green Lantern wouldn't receive a game until 2011's Green Lantern: Rise of the Manhunters.
It's sad to see promising concepts from this era languish in obscurity, but some unreleased 16-bit games do eventually get a happy ending. For example, Nintendo officially released Star Fox 2 in 2017, over 20 years after it was originally completed. More recently, new emulation has allowed enthusiasts to try games for Sega's canceled Sega VR headset, bringing what was once considered lost media back to the light of day.