Wolverine Keeps Moving in Rare Footage From a 32X X-Men Game That Never Arrived

SEGA spent a lot of money and effort trying to convince people the 32X was worth buying in 1995. One of the attractions they brought to E3 that year was an X-Men game that never made it past the booth. More than three decades later, the Video Game History Foundation pulled a short clip from its E3 1995 archives and put it online. The footage lasts about forty seconds and mostly shows Wolverine running through empty rooms.

The video begins on the show floor, where a large yellow 32X banner hangs high above the gigantic X-Men emblem, behind which the entire area is covered in comic art of the characters. There’s a row of monitors down below, one of which is displaying the demo. The camera zooms in on that screen, and we see Wolverine, dressed in his signature yellow and blue, with claws out and tearing down a long blue-lit hallway on the run. The walls are lined with stone columns, and you can see little particles of material floating in the air. He just keeps going, doesn’t even slow down, and the camera is directly behind him, slightly above, giving you a great view of the entire running animation and how quickly the landscape passes by.

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A few seconds later, we switch to something fresh. There are enormous stone figurines on either side of the path that resemble guardians or sculptures. Wolverine just runs straight through them as if they weren’t there. The following section opens up into a much larger space with crimson pillars and some decorative screens or panels that appear Asian-inspired. He simply keeps traveling at the same steady pace as before. The camera switches to the side for a moment, then Wolverine rushes past several vertical supports along a wall, and the final scene shows a very gloomy chamber with tall grid-like windows that let in blue light. Just when you think that’s it, the demo fades to the Video Game History Foundation logo.

This demo marked a significant shift from the early prototype released in 2009. That one was actually very limited because you could only play as Bishop and there was just a small selection of temple-style levels with no collision or physics. Back then, they said you could play as Wolverine, Bishop, Rogue, or Iceman, but it appears that Wolverine was already playable by the summer of 1995, at least according to the E3 clip.

The X-Men game was developed by a Danish company called Zyrinx, however they worked under the Scavenger label. We know they were involved because they’ve already created several excellent Genesis games. At the time, they claimed to have SGI-rendered character art and motion-capture animations. The concept was for an action game that combined exploration, battle, and various traps in a pseudo-3D environment. SEGA planned to publish it, however it never appeared on store shelves.

One thing that has come out is that the project was canceled because to contractual concerns between Scavenger and SEGA. Apparently, the latter opted to abandon the game and reassign Scavenger to work on a Batman game, which was also canceled as it became evident that the 32X was not going to take off. In the end, Scavenger was compensated for their services and went on.
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