Superman

Superman was a game made off of an early version of Adventure which basically allowed players to pick up items and move them places. By being sort of pushed by Warner Bros for Atari to make, Superman mostly gets by for being a game that was basically like no other at its time. This is 1979 and the Atari 2600 was made to basically play variants of Tank and Pong. This game looks even better than most at the time as it actually has multicoloured characters, a feature that would only show up in Arcades just within the same year.

As it was based on Adventure, the game is probably the first graphical adventure game, and certainly the first action-adventure game. As we're way before Zelda or even Escape From the Mindmaster , don't expect puzzle solving so much as item babysitting. Enemies will mostly just make Superman become Clark Kent instead of dying or losing health, so you have to run around and find Lois Lane to become Superman again. The goal is to put Lex Luger and his cronies in prison (by scooping them up as Superman) and then find pieces of a bridge (shown in a crude, but early video game cut scene).

On that note, you really need to read the manual to understand this game. Unlike Adventure, this game featured a side-view as opposed to a top-down one, so navigating the map if you want to call it that is a nightmare. Even taking shortcuts in the subway is really made complicated. The radar at the top is unclear and you just wish city blocks were at least colour coded to help you navigate.

Superman has a lot of "firsts" in video games, but it becomes really obvious that Adventure is just a much more thought-out version. Superman looks far nicer, and I fear that Atari sometimes pushes Adventure as "the big one" because they still own the rights to distribute and sell copies of it in compilations, but it is a weird bit of cruelty that Superman is just a mild footnote in video game history when it presented so many new things to the video game world first.

Play as superman and save damsels in distress. Pretty cool that you actually can change between normal person and superman by entering phone booths actually. Unfortunatly its an atari game, so the visuals and sound are pretty crude. But there are a lot of ideas here that are cool. Grabbing bandits and getting then to jail, grabbing wood to make a bridge, and having freedom to fly around. Obviously it wouldnt pass as a flash game nowadays, but it had some pretty cool ideas.