Why does Superman [64, which isn't really in the title] have such an enduring legacy?

There are a lot of terrible games out there. Most are forgotten quickly, some have a cult following, but a few become legend. Often you can identify the reasons behind those legends. E.T. for the Atari 2600 helped cause the game crash of the early 80s and changed the industry forever. The Zelda CD-I games took a franchise that was big then and has only gotten bigger and made these weird, terrible, games, in the most un-Nintendo like way ever. Shaq Fu is a fighting game based on a basketball legend at the height of his popularity, a truly ridiculous premise.

Superman 64 shares a couple attributes with these games, chiefly a recognizable license and the fact that it came out at a time when there were fewer games on the market so we all knew about most of them, but it's hardly unique in that. There is an almost endless river of licensed trash, with plenty of bad superhero games cluttering shelves. There are multiple awful Batman games on the PlayStation, and almost every major hero has had his or her share of trash software. Yet Superman 64 seems more recognized and important than those other games, despite not having the industry impact of an E.T. or the novelty of the Zelda CD-I games or Shaq Fu. After all while a basketball player fighting game is absurd, superhero games have been around for almost as long as there have been video games.

So what makes it special? Why is it that it was inevitable that Blight Club would eventually get to this particular game?

I think there are a few factors. For one, while there are tons of superhero games there are not that many Superman games specifically. He has not been nearly as prolific as contemporaries like Spider-Man or Batman, and if you don't count appearances in franchises like Injustice or Suicide Squad we haven't seen a Superman game in a long time. For another, it was an N64 game. The N64 was a console a lot of people had during their impressionable childhoods and it was a console without nearly as many games as something like the PlayStation, so it was easier to be aware of more of them. Almost every N64 kid rented Superman 64 or played it at a friend's house or at least saw it on the shelves and read about it in magazines or on the web.

Finally there's the premise of the first few levels. Superman 64 is not actually a game about flying through rings, but that's how it starts and that's how it's remembered. The sheer stupidity of taking the Superman character, a god among men, and reducing him to flying through the rings shows such a lack of interest in the character and a paucity of imagination that it stands out in the mind. The Catwoman game on Gamecube is terrible, but that's at least a game about doing Catwoman things like stealing and fighting goons. Flying Superman through rings is a Shaq-Fu level of dumb that resonates with people.

There's something fascinating about how the makers of Superman 64 managed to create a terrible game that has somehow endured with a lot more visibility than many better games made at the same time. Most of the N64 library has faded into the background. When's the last time you thought about Excitebike 64, a top 25 seller on the system and a pretty good game? But Superman 64 comes up again and again. The developers managed to capture something special by creating a game that's not just bad but also ill conceived, with a character who is not well suited to games and doesn't get a lot of them. They made a hallmark of the N64 library by being so bad at their jobs they transcended dreck and ascended into camp.

More than anything, Superman was Having a Moment in the '90s. He was the boyfriend du jour on TV (Lois and Clark), he died in the comics, and the people who couldn't believe he'd died were also the people putting money together to ensure he lived.

Superman (64) had to happen. And video game rental stores ensured its endurance, as well as grandma Christmas bags.

I also echo what Nodima said. At the time, the Superman: Animated Series was quite popular and watch by a lot of kids, like myself, and some adults back in the 90s. Comic book animated shows in general were pretty big in the 90s into the 2000s. So people were looking for a good Superman game at the time. Because it was made for the N64, technically the most advanced console at the time, people couldn't believe how bad it turned out. I think this is the reason its reputation has endured over the years. Also, X-Play did a good job roasting Superman 64 every chance they got.

@av_gamer: Superman certainly was on an upswing at the time, but there were other properties that were also extremely popular at the time like South Park, Power Rangers, and Batman (Beyond) that had terrible N64 games that are long forgotten even though they were very hot properties at the time. And of course there are lots of examples of tie in games being released alongside massive hit movies with the games sucking but being completely forgotten soon after release.

A form of meme culture has certainly played a part. Superman 64 was called out as the worst game of all time so often that for a certain generation that alone made it more prominent than it would otherwise have been.

I think many games that seemingly are called "bad" in the modern age 2000 to 2020, are not that bad just early for what they were trying to do.

Open world flying on an N64 controller in a time where so new 3D space control methods had been tested was just not a great place for that game to be attempted.

We can slam Superman 64 all we want, but some of that was just N64 was not nearly as good as it needed to be....PS was not nearly as good as it needed to be...Saturn was not nearly as good as it needed to be. The controllers, teh understanding of programming, the constep of gaming in 3d worlds was just developing and growing - there were mistakes.

On teh other hand...practice. I'll tell you what I adjusted to tank controls in RE games, I adjsued to finger bending button combos to make Armed Core work, I played the original Tomb Tander with D=pad controls and ist very idiosyncratic controls and camera. Fog, jaggy texture, low-poly characters are what we had and we enjoyed "at the time" teh games.

A lot of games systems and control that 18-30 years olds piss & moan about were do-able for us. People who are 40, 50 and 60 years old PLAYED so many games with issues the games were the cutting edge, state-of-the-art, and nothing better had been created.

@monkeyking1969: This is such an odd argument to apply to Superman 64.

The N64 had a bunch of flying games that worked fine. Pilotwings 64 was a launch title. Starfox 64 and Star Wars: Rogue Squadron were both huge hits people loved.

Meanwhile Superman 64 was despised at the time by critics and was a laughing stock. It was not cutting edge. It was trash.

The general point isn't wrong about how games age and that the 5th gen consoles had a lot of growing pains and issues doing 3D, but to say that Superman 64 is bad because the N64 couldn't do better is odd when the N64 had numerous better games in a similar genre.

The issue with Superman 64 (not even the game's actual title) is that it remained a punching bag for people who already hated how prominent and "boring" Superman was. Add onto that the changes that Warner was apparently weirdly insistent on (the gamedevs had to PROVE that Superman could swim in the comics before they'd let him do it in the game, he wasn't allowed to cause property damage, he wasn't allowed to do real harm, and of course "kryptonite fog") so it became easy, low-effort fodder especially for the ultra-edgy writers on the early internet.

The other side of the coin is Batman & Robin: a movie that was savaged for the crime of doing exactly what the studio asked of it and daring to not take seriously a billionaire in tights fighting street crime with a pair of sidekicks.

You can trace the 'grimdark bullshit' we're dealing with in movies to the perception of these two properties, especially on the early internet where hating on something counted as criticism and the likes of Harry Knowles were becoming prominent by shitting on things rather than actually critiquing them.

I'm also one of those people who think early-3D was a massive mistake, but that's another talk for another time.

Early 3D was a possibility space. Those eggs needed to spilled on the floor, spaghetti on the walls to find out just what worked.

Meanwhile, they're still trying to crack interactive Superman. Just make it a roguelike "solving the world's problems" simulator but with X-Com time pressures and the inevitable realisation that you can't save them all.

Whatever the backstage hand tying that was involved with Warner on the studio, it doesn't excuse that the game was not a Superman game that anyone wanted. The very first level is an overly difficult, hard to control stage where you're trying to get Superman to fly through rings. And if you somehow fly through all the rings and get to the next stage you're greeted with a sequence where you're supposed to throw two cars in an incredibly tight time frame. None of these things is Superman much less a Superhero game. In any Batman game, including the bad ones, the first level has you at least punching fools in the face.

Sure, the personality driven gaming sites helped propel its status as worst game ever, I recall seeing videos about it on Screwattack way back when, but it's deserved as far as I'm concerned.

@chamurai: I do have some sympathy for the developers who were almost certainly constrained by budget, time, and ridiculous rules, but yes this game is terrible in both conception and execution. Even if there was meddling and Superman couldn't punch people or whatever you could at least have started with him doing something vaguely cool like rescuing people from a burning building or stopping a train from going off the tracks or punching robots. Flying through rings was always an idiotic way to start a superhero game, and then they botched that!

I will say that this game was never the worst game ever made. There is so much actually broken software out there, and so many weirdly conceived of games, that it was always an exaggeration. On the other hand this was one of the worst games that a largish number of people actually played, as opposed to something like Cosmic Race on PS1.