Crossover #6: Phantom 2040
When I was growing up, Saturday morning cartoons were a fairly mainstream staple of my weekends. Hey, I was a Navy brat; I never stayed in any one place long enough to get forced onto a sports team, and I wasn't pretty enough to make friends. As a result, comic books and cartoons were my weekend buddies. One of my favorites, shortly before my mother deemed me "too old" to watch cartoons (this wasn't a bad thing, though, because she enrolled me in Saturday art classes), was the intelligent and stylish Phantom 2040.
The cartoon had a lot going for it: an interesting story, smart writing, and character designs by the superlative Peter Chung (the man behind Aeon Flux). Of course, this was not what mainstream audiences were really going for and the cartoon was nixed after a year and a half. However, during this time, Viacom New Media managed to put out a 2D platformer which fell under the rarest of all game genres: a licensed video game that didn't suck eggs.
The plot was something straight out of Chung's Flux-ian universe: the world's environment, following a series of "Resource Wars", is decimated and most of mankind lives in a distopian urban squalor while the rich and elite live in artificial paradises in the form of skyscrapers. The only hope to rejuvenate the planet's ecosystem lies within The Ghost Jungle, a mutated sprawl of plantlife beneath the city of Metropia, and the only person who can defend the Jungle from those who would abuse it is Kit Walker Jr., AKA the 24th Phantom.
Building on the rich backstory provided by The Phantom, Phantom 2040 combined a strong combat-based platformer with a detailed and branching storyline. Aside from standard beat-em-up action, players could use a lightsaber-like whip to maneuver around the levels and combat their enemies. While it sounds like a cheap rip-off of Bionic Commando, the whip's eventually-increasing range allowed players to re-explore the game's vast levels in order to find new items and information that were originally unobtainable. On top of that, the plot featured over 20 different endings that depended on players' choices throughout the game.
Despite the fact that the game received largely positive reviews, it wasn't an immense commercial success because of The Phantom's relatively obscure status. It's a shame, because the game is still really good, even after all these years. Hopefully the game will be coming out for the Virtual Console relatively soon, but if you happen to have either an SNES or Genesis you can find it for less than $5 on eBay. If you're a fan of sci-fi comics and/or animation, you really can't go wrong with Phantom 2040.
Boy of Tomorrow
Posted to Comics on 30 May 2007
Other stuff like this: crossover, genesis, ghost who walks, peter chung, phantom 2040, platformer, snes, viacom new media
