Sunman

Sunman is an unreleased action video game developed by EIM and planned to be published by Sunsoft for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1992. Despite being mostly complete, it was never commercially released. Also, unlike most video games of this time, it was never even announced. Most cancelled games saw months’ worth of publicity in video game magazines before fading off the game-watch radars. The gameplay is very similar to Sunsoft’s Batman games, Batman and Batman: Return of the Joker, in that the character can run, jump, punch and duck, although in this game the player can also fly simply by pushing up. There are also some side scrolling flying levels where you can shoot laser/heat vision from your eyes. The game is divided into five scenes with one-four areas with a boss at the end of each area.

The game features a superhero, named Sunman. He is very reminiscent of Superman with his cape, and flying abilities, as well as the games title screen seems to match that of the Superman logo. Sunsoft’s involvement with other DC Comics character licenses lead some to speculate that Sunman was intended to be a Superman game, but DC for whatever reason decided not to go along and the game had some changes made to lose the likeness. In an interview with planner/director Kenji Eno, it was confirmed that this was originally intended to be a Superman game.

At Sunsoft of America, David Siller was responsible for the Superman game. He says that he and Eno were not in agreement about the game’s direction. Eno didn’t understand the character of Superman, but in the end it was contractually up to Eno what to do. ”The developer that Japan commissioned to do this development, Kenji Eno, was insensitive to the authenticity that license required and wanted the same freedom granted to “Dynamite Batman”. I had a meeting with him at his tiny studio in Osaka and we could not reach an amiable agreement, so Sunsoft changed it to an original title “Sunman”. Sunsoft essentially ate crow and swallowed the expense out of embarrassment both to DC Comics/WB for failing to reign this development in and also rather than have a feud with a temperamental artistic avant garde developer.

On Nov 7, 2003, a dump of the Sunman prototype was released on the internet.