During a recent PAX West panel, director of God of War, Cory Barlog shared a lengthy, seemingly premeditated, pitch for a Superman game.
The panel itself was called “The Quest for the Perfect Superman Game” and featured: Jared Petty, Greg Miller, Kat Bailey, Gary Whitta, Sydnee Goodman, as well as Barlog. The insiders discussed previous endeavours to bring the Man of Steel into the video-game medium, most of which were poorly received, and brought up their own theoretical concepts for one.
Following the panel, Game Informer reported Barlog's comments. Firstly, Barlog joked about "the totally obvious pitch of old man Superman has a kid and he’s trying to figure out how to teach him," referencing his previous, critically-acclaimed, title God of War.
Following that Barlog spitballed a coming-of-age story, reminiscent of the Persona game series and the TV series Smallville:
Young Clark Kent – you have to go to school but you also are also uncovering that you’re the greatest American hero with your powers and it’s a sort of awkward coming of age idea that you have to balance. Literally you’re taking tests and dealing with the social construct of high school while also figuring out what does it mean to have these powers? It’s totally Persona and I thought that’s a little derivative so, I won’t do that.
Knowing the first idea to be imitative, Barlog moved onto another option - one that would focus on Superman realising that he can’t help everyone.
Then I really came back to an idea that I think everyone here was touching on. Superman was created at a time when we needed some idealistic, perfect person to aspire to, which is why he is so flawless. Like, literally, he almost has no flaws. And he’s extremely hard to work with when you’re talking at an interactive level. The one flaw, and I don’t think it’s really a flaw, it’s just who we are as human beings, is this idea of caring. I think the best thing you can do with a Superman game is to kind of explore the psychology of what it would be like to be a person who slowly beings to realize that he can’t save everybody.
You begin the game and you are able to hear a little bit. Maybe he’s a little bit younger, or maybe he just started a little bit later in his life, but the idea is you begin to hear, as the player… help. You’re not helping Superman. You’re not Superman yet. Nobody knows about Superman. But when you start helping people you build up a reputation and then you start to hear, “Help, Superman.” And you start to hear more of these 'help Superman!' voices from all around. As the game progresses, as you do these sort of good deeds, more and more people are aware of you, they start following you on twitter – @superman – and everyone starts asking for help and this is where it really starts to unravel.
It’s then that, along with the player, Superman would be hit with the realisation that there are simply too many people to save and have to deal with the consequences of that.
As a Kryptonian and a human being a little bit, he has no capacity to sort of manage this. I don’t know if there is a form of brain where you sort of have no filter. Where you literally take everything in the world in? That’s who he is. He is taking everything in. When he chooses, or when you choose to save anyone in this game… Let’s say there are four people who need to be saved. At your best moment as Superman, you can save two. That means two were not saved and that weighs on him. It’s not the people that he saved. It’s the two people that he didn’t save, the crimes he couldn’t stop, and there is suffering that comes from that.
The idea of this is, as you get to the beginning of the third act, you realize, as Superman, that the brute force method of fisticuffs, the idea of constantly trying to chase your tail to save people individually, is not working. You have to figure out a different way because the ultimate goal, psychologically, to maintain some kind of sanity, is to actually try and save everybody. It’s a great, idealistic, fantastic concept, but fairly impossible.
Following the lengthy pitch (so lengthy that not all of it has been mentioned here), an audience member pointed out that Barlog's pitch was missing a crucial ingredient - gameplay. Barlog begrudgingly admitted, "You noticed I didn't mention that part, huh?"
Superman's invincibility and immense power-set would seem to be the most difficult advent to tackle from a game-making standpoint. The acclaimed game-director did thankfully give his two-cents on the matter:
I would not have him flying. I think he would have his ability of speed so you would feel like you’re playing a Flash game at the beginning. And I think for me that loop would start you out and you wouldn’t be able to fight anybody. You would be taking care of things that are less sort of fisticuffs so that you start to get your feet wet, and then the first time a baddie appears, somebody who is kind of an antagonistic force… you would feel just as uneasy as Superman would be. This would feel more like an origin story, like a Spider-Man 1 kind of feel that he is just figuring this out.
What do you think of Barlog's pitch? Would you like to see a Superman game come to fruition?