Although they have been branching out as of late, Nintendo has always been a company synonymous with family-friendly titles. In 1996, while Nintendo was releasing games like Super Mario RPG for the SNES, another main man planned to make the jump to SNES in spite of the family-friendly image. Lobo, known for his cigars, intergalactic bounty hunting and absurd strength, is DC's most violent antihero and yet nearly found himself a home on Nintendo's most profitable console at the time.
Lobo was DC's answer to the gritty antiheroes of the Marvel Universe. Although he was originally a parody character, he found an audience with his readers and eventually had his run of comic books. Lobo was a fighting game developed by Ocean of America starring the Main Man himself and other lesser-known fighters, including a sadistic Santa named Kringle and an interstellar cop named Dox. The game used pre-rendered graphics inspired by the most popular fighting game at the time, Mortal Kombat. Ocean of America would have released Lobo during the Winter of 1996 on the SNES and the Sega Genesis. However, Ocean of America canceled it at the last minute.
Today, the game is largely detailed on sites like the Lost Media Archive, but that means we know much more about it. Each character in the game had two health bars and possessed four special moves, aside from the titular character, who had five. The game even had "finishing moves" that took heavy inspiration from Mortal Kombat's Fatalities. However, these appear to have only been in the Sega Genesis version of the game, and it is unclear whether they planned to program them into the SNES version or not. The game had multiple modes, including a solo story mode and a multiplayer versus mode. The story mode followed Lobo taking on bounties while the intergalactic police chased him down. The only way to play as the other characters is to hop into versus or training mode.
The developers canceled the game at the last moment hour for reasons unknown, but it's most likely that Ocean of America ran into financial trouble and could not finish it. Although Ocean of America canceled the game's release, the Sega Genesis port was eventually found and leaked online, allowing fans to experience what could have been. In 2014, fans wishing for a physical copy of Lobo were able to order one from NintendoAge.com, which shipped a limited run of Lobo for SNES. These went on sale during February of 2015 and sold out by that June.
In recent years, Lobo has become even more popular for DC fans, and it's this popularity that finally helped him land a spot in the fighting game Injustice as a downloadable DLC character in all his cigar-chomping, bike revving glory. However, players who would prefer to see the Main Man in a more retro style still can. Although the physical carts are no longer in rotation, and the game was never fully developed, ROMs of the game can still be found online and played with an emulator on PC.