Watch the Live-Action Performances that Fueled the Worst Batman Game Ever

Aside from including Kiss from a Rose on the soundtrack, not much about Joel Schumacher's Batman Forever can be called a "great idea." You'd hope we'd at least snag a decent video game out of it, but no. Right up there with Batman: Dark Tomorrow and Gotham City Racer is Acclaim's most infamous stinker, Batman Forever, a side-scrolling beat 'em up that used the captured performances of real actors instead of drawn pixels.

If we got anything out of it, and I mean absolutely anything, it's that twenty years down the line a high resolution video of the doofy actors unknowingly taking part in one of the worst games ever made would surface.

The footage you see here was discovered by our friend Aaron, who is still sharing some of the amazing gaming history artifacts he discovered on a pile of SGI Indy computers that once belonged to Acclaim.

So what are you looking at here? Batman Forever's box art emphasizes not once, not twice, but thrice that there's something special about the game's graphics. Forever used the not made up (or at least not made up by them) technology of Ultimatte Cinefusion, a patented technique for crisper green screen matting. Clearly trying to harp on Mortal Kombat's look, Batman Forever had digitized actors constantly swaying their bodies in that unmistakable Johnny Cage way.

The game was a gauntlet of goons in pairs to be punched by Batman and Robin, then broken up by cramped platforming segments that needed such specific use of gadgets that many frustrated players never bothered beyond the first stage. The third most memorable thing about the game is that all the goons have their own name for some reason, meaning the actors in this video were destined to become legends like "Pierson," "Mad Ty," and "Honker."

Maybe Cinefusion's fidelity didn't matter much in 1995 when the platforms were VCR and Sega Genesis, but the modern audience can certainly appreciate big men dressed like clowns swiping at imaginary Batman. Next time I'd like to meet the font-horny idiot responsible for the arcade version's interface.