The Forgotten Games of the Marvel Universe

Spider-Man and Captain America in Dr. Doom’s Revenge

Yet another game with a stupidly long name, this title was released in 1989 and sees Spider-Man and Captain America team up for the very first time in a video game. Published by Empire for the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, PC, Amiga and Atari ST it also features Dr. Doom as the main antagonist.

Essentially a Street Fighter II style fighting game, you alternate between both characters as you take on a series of opponents in one-on-one battles. These include characters that will be very familiar to fans of the comic books including Machete, Boomerang, Oddball and Electro. Interestingly, it also has a cameo by The Hulk too.

Before each fight you are greeted with some great looking comic book style panels telling the story so far. But once in the game it’s far less interesting with extremely boring battles that drag on too long and don’t offer a wide enough range of moves.

Dr. Doom’s Revenge gets lots of things right – the comic book style presentation and range of characters being the most notable. However the tedious gameplay ruins any enjoyment you may get out of it.

Questprobe Featuring The Hulk

Developed by the legendary Scott Adams for his own company Adventure International, this title was the first game to be published in the now obscure Questprobe Series. It was released for the Acorn Electron, Atari 8-bit, BBC Micro, Commodore 64, PC, Dragon 32 and ZX Spectrum in 1984 to critical acclaim.

The game takes the form of a text adventure with graphical interludes depicting key parts of the story. All commands are entered through the keyboard and require you to use a series of predefined words and phrases that, depending on what you put, alter the path of the story in different ways. These include movements, for example “Move west”, as well actions such as “Pick up” or “Kill”.

The other Marvel characters to feature in their own Questprobe games were The Human Torch, The Thing and Spider-Man. Another game featuring the X-Men was programmed but never released due to the sad demise of Adventure International in 1985. All of the games are still highly regarded by text adventure fans.

Modern gamers may find the Questprobe series a bit clunky and unappealing compared today’s big budget productions. But there is actually a great game in each one that stays authentic to the subject matter and they will certainly please all the true fans of the Marvel Universe.

Well wasn’t that Marvelous?

We hope you enjoyed this look back at some obscure video games from the Marvel Universe and encourage you to go and try some of these out for yourself.

Perhaps you are aware of some even more weird, wacky and obscure Marvel games that we haven’t mentioned? If you do know any then please let us know in the comments as it would be great to hear from you!

Or, if you like, just let us know what your favourite games from the Marvel Universe are.

Until we meet again . . . .

Excelsior!

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