Superheroes are everywhere now. They dominate cinemas, streaming queues, merchandise racks, and the collective unconscious of anyone who grew up in the last forty years. The IP has been stretched into every conceivable format.
Arcade games, though, caught superheroes at a different moment — when the mythology was still sharp, when the characters had weight because you didn’t see them every three months, and when putting them in a video game felt like permission to do something genuinely fun rather than an obligation to protect brand equity.
Bragging Rights has assembled an unreasonable collection of superhero arcade experiences, ranging from 1990 cabinet classics to contemporary Limited Edition pinball machines built like furniture. Here are seven worth your time.
1. Spider-Man the Video Game (1991)
Konami’s 1991 side-scrolling beat-’em-up is the rare licensed game that understood what made the source material work. Spider-Man doesn’t just punch — he swings, he webs enemies, he shrinks to normal human size in some stages while villains tower above him at screen-filling scale. The roster includes Black Cat, Hawkeye, and Sub-Mariner alongside Peter Parker, which is a choices-were-made lineup that somehow works.
Four players can run through the game simultaneously, which immediately establishes the particular chaos of four people trying to web-strike the same enemy from slightly different angles. The sprite work is genuinely impressive for 1991 — Venom looks like Venom, Doom looks like Doom, and the whole thing moves with enough momentum that you understand why this game had lines around the block during its original arcade run.
It’s a museum piece with good bones. The controls feel right in a way that many of its contemporaries don’t.
2. Batman (1990, Atari Games)
Atari’s Batman cabinet arrived the same year as the Michael Keaton film, riding the exact crest of the cultural wave, and it’s significantly weirder and more interesting than you’d expect from a licensed tie-in released at the height of Batman mania.
This is a side-scroller with a grappling hook — you swing between platforms, fight Joker’s goons, and navigate Gotham’s rooftops with a physicality that most contemporaries didn’t manage. The cabinet design is appropriately moody for 1990’s Dark Knight era aesthetics: black, angular, a little overwrought. The gameplay rewards learning the hook timing. Swing in wrong and you take damage. Get it right and the game opens up in ways that feel briefly, genuinely cool.
The Keaton/Nicholson era has a specific flavor — gothic, operatic, slightly camp in the best way — and this game captures it better than it had any right to.
3. X-Men (6-Player)
Konami’s X-Men cabinet is the gold standard of the superhero beat-’em-up, and the six-player version — six people, six separate screens, one long connected play surface — is one of the great physical arcade experiences. The cabinet is enormous. Finding one is an event.
Cyclops, Wolverine, Storm, Colossus, Nightcrawler, and Dazzler (Dazzler!), each with distinct move sets and special attacks. The game looks like the Pryde of the X-Men animated pilot come to life, which is either a selling point or a neutral fact depending on your feelings about 1989 animation. The enemies are Magneto’s Brotherhood, the gameplay is controlled mayhem, and the six-player configuration turns the experience into a social event. You’re not just playing — you’re navigating six people’s simultaneous chaos with varying levels of competence.
There is no more efficient way to make six strangers feel like a team for twelve minutes.
4. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
The 1989 Konami arcade game remains the definitive TMNT experience — more so than the NES port, more so than the later Tournament Fighters, more so than anything that came after. The four-player cooperative beat-’em-up format, the era-perfect character designs, the fact that playing as Michaelangelo with nunchucks feels somehow better than playing as the other three turtles — it all holds up.
The pizza mechanic (grab slices to restore health) is embedded in a generation’s muscle memory. The Foot Soldiers get knocked into the screen and bounce off in ways that are still satisfying. The bosses — Bebop, Rocksteady, Shredder — are exactly what they need to be.
Four-player cooperative games are a social technology, and this one perfected it.
5. Avengers: Infinity Quest (Limited Edition Pinball)
Stern’s Infinity Quest Limited Edition is a different category of machine — less game, more installation. The LE build quality involves custom powder-coated metalwork, hand-numbered plaques, and artwork that’s been given actual design attention rather than the usual licensed-property slap-and-ship approach.
The gameplay mechanics center on the Infinity Gauntlet — collect the six stones across a multi-stage progression that mirrors the film’s structure. Each stone activates different modes. The playfield has enough going on that you’re never doing the same thing twice in the same session. The callouts use actual MCU audio, which is either immersive or uncanny depending on your relationship with the films.
This is the machine that converted people who thought they didn’t like pinball. It explains itself while you play it, which is a design achievement that most pinball machines actively refuse.
6. Deadpool (Premium Pinball)
Stern’s Deadpool Premium is the loudest machine in any room it occupies, and this is a feature. The Deadpool voice work (Nolan North doing his best Ryan Reynolds impression, or possibly doing something entirely his own — the line blurs) is relentless, fourth-wall-breaking, and somehow not annoying after twenty minutes because the game earns it.
The playfield has a chimichanga-shaped scoop. There’s a hot tub. The katana ramps are aggressive. The game constantly editorializes on your play quality, usually unfavorably, and this somehow makes you want to keep playing to prove something to a pinball machine.
The rock soundtrack is loud and appropriate. The whole machine has the energy of something that doesn’t care if you like it, which paradoxically makes you like it.
7. The Walking Dead (Limited Edition Pinball)
Dark horse entry on this list — the Walking Dead universe is superhero-adjacent at best — but the Stern LE build makes the argument that the characters in TWD are functioning as mythological figures in the same way cape comics do: Rick Grimes as reluctant hero, Negan as apocalyptic villain, survival as the actual superpower.
The machine plays harder than it looks. The Prison multiball sequence is legitimately brutal. The Lucille hit — literally bashing a bat target to activate Negan-related modes — delivers impact feedback that no other machine replicates. The LE metalwork and artwork are exceptional even by Stern’s standards.
It’s dark, it’s punishing, and it commits entirely to its own logic. Sometimes that’s exactly what you want from a game.
The Verdict
The range here is the point. 1990 licensed cabinet to contemporary LE pinball — superheroes translated across three decades of arcade design thinking. Every one of these games understood something different about what makes the mythology work. The best of them still hold the answer.
Find your character. Start your plays.
