Not many people will remember this game. It was pretty much ignored upon release, only garnering a couple of scathing reviews before disappearing into the giant pile of unplayed games that lives in every Commodore 64 owner’s bedroom.

But man, I remember this game very well.

I bought it shortly after release, allured by the budget price and the fact that it offered “ARCADE GRAPHICS” on the box. Arcade graphics, man! Not your regular graphics. My sister chose BMX Simulator for her game purchase, but that just looked dumb and stupid.

Upon playing it at home I discovered that Super G-Man was a terrible game. What you see in the comic pretty much matches what you did in the game – which isn’t much. You floated about a bit and shot aliens and crashed into the ground and then came back to life and the timer ran out and you died. All of a sudden that copy of BMX Simulator looked mighty tempting but my sister wouldn’t let me play it until I apologised for calling it stupid.

So I grew even more determined to eke out any amount of fun that I could out of the thing, playing it for hours at a time until I convinced myself it wasn’t that bad. My friend and I would take turns playing it, unable to be convinced that there’s no fun in it. We figured that if we played long enough, and discovered its many secrets, there would be a fun game to be unearthed. We were wrong. Very very wrong.

It’s saving grace was that we decided to use it as the basis for our year 9 science experiment. We proposed that to determine the effects of sleep deprivation on the human mind, we would play Super G-Man for 24 hours and record our scores over time. This was the only time we were able to use the Commodore 64 for the supposed “educational purposes” I tricked my parents into believing to get them to buy it in the first place.

The game was terrible, we ended up staying up until 3am playing it, and we even managed to get a passing grade for the class. That was pretty much it for me with high school, and now 20 years later I’m drawing stupid comics about Super G-Man. So thank you Mike Clark, whoever you are, for making a crap game that I love anyway.