Spider-Man and Batman in The Revenge of Shinobi

[The Laughing Fish]

Has anybody here ever played the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis classic The Revenge of the Shinobi? I owned this game on the console twenty odd years ago, and Spider-Man featured as one of two bosses on Stage 6. Sega made four versions of the game because they were infringing copyright - using many other popular characters without their owners' permission. Including Godzilla, the Terminator, Rambo, and yes, Batman. Even the title screen of Shinobi blatantly resembled a character from a Japanese TV show called Shadow Warriors.

The version I owned had a copyright disclaimer crediting Spider-Man as a Marvel character before the game started. Once you defeat Spider-Man, he climbs off screen and then a Man-Bat-looking creature takes his place.

In another version I played on an emulator years later, Spider-Man morphs into Batman instead. Both Batman and the Man-Bat knock-off have the ability to fly and dash across the screen with a swarm of bats trying to hit you.

There are more details about the differences in the game with subsequent versions, which the developers still had to address when the game would be re-released on Nintendo Wii.

https://www.movie-censorship.com/report.php?ID=821265

I know Japan had their own version of Spider-Man on TV back in the 1970s, and it had nothing to do with the original Marvel Comics version. Maybe that was why Sega thought they could get away with copyright infringement. That, and they already had the license to make the Spider-Man vs. The Kingpin game (another game I owned, but nowhere near as good as Shinobi) when the Mega Drive/Genesis was first released. As far as I know, Spider-Man remained the only licensed character in the game. I suppose Marvel knew the character was popular in that country, and were willing to let the character to stay in the game as long as Sega co-operated. I'm not sure if the Batman version ever got sold in stores for long, if at all. Still, it's strange that the Terminator boss on Stage 3 still appeared in all versions of the game.