X-Men was to be a licenced game based on the comic and released by The Edge, but it is believed to got caught up in the same troubles which The Punisher had hit.
Oddly, Ross Sillifant found a quick news article where the game is referred to as “The Uncanny X-Men”, where there were to be three games targeted with a focus mostly on Wolverine.
In late September 2021, artist Tahir Rashid got in touch to confirm that he was one of the artists on the game, doing some sprite work tests. He reveals in the comments that the game was to be a platformer. It is likely that the majority of his work was on the Atari ST version, but would have later been transferred to C64.
Tahir mentions that he did a character line up for the main characters as an art test to see how big they could get the sprites. He left The Edge about 3 weeks into the project, and as far as he’s aware – they pushed The Punisher to the front of development.
Had the X-Men development continued, it would have been coded on the ST by Glynn Kendall (who did Alien Syndrome ST with him, as well as Soldier of Light and Darius+). Glynn left shortly afterwards, so it never progressed much further.
The game was to be a platform beat-em-up, where you could swap in different X-Men to solve obstacles/puzzles and power up and smash parts of the levels. Ironically Tahir ended up working on Wolverine for the SEGA MegaDrive a decade or so later.
Tahir hopes to find something of his original concepts for us to add to the site, so watch this space. He is sure that he still has them. If you know anything more about the development (especially the C64 edition), please get in touch!
Contributions: Ross Sillifant, Tahir Rashid
Hi
I just saw this recently regarding the X-Men game I was unsure if this game was announced as The Edge licensed a few titles from Marvel which they were still negotiating a deal with they also licensed the movie Amadeus for some strange reason. I may have some artwork for X-Men as I did the original Sprite work tests this version was going to be a platform game unlike the shooter The Punisher.
Hi Tahir, thanks for the confirmation! I’ll get the page updated quickly.