Exclusive interview: Superman Returns

Wednesday 10 May 2006
With so many superhero games crowding the aisles, Superman has a fight on his hands to stand out from the lycra-clad crowd. Still, if the Man of Steel can't overcome the odds, who can?

We sat down with Chris Gray, executive producer at EA Tiburon - the guys behind GoldenEye: Rogue Agent, but we won't hold that against them - to discover how Superman Returns is flexing Clark Kent's hidden muscle.

How do you intend to give someone playing Superman Returns the feeling of being the superhero to end all superheroes?
We've designed objectives that require all of his superpowers and were just beyond the scope of other superheroes to deal with.

Hulk can pick up a car or a bus, but only Superman can pick up a building or a bridge. The fact he can fly at high speed through the city gives us a lot of game mechanics you wouldn't see in other games.

Flying is one of the big challenges that we wanted to deal with early on, so we spent a lot of time studying games that had flying in them and working out why they were hard to control. We've created a flying mechanic that's meant to be something like swimming through the air, but at the same time it's like driving in three dimensions.