With the 16-bit consoles, we were able to finally recognize the characters on the screen and, even though most of them are mildly entertaining side-scrolling beat-em-alls, actually enjoy playing these games. As you can see on the box designs displayed below, comic artists started being used: that’s Glenn Fabry on Separation Anxiety, possibly Butch Guice on Captain America and that looks like Mike DeCarlo inking the Batman and Superman covers, over Jim Aparo? On the other hand, that led to abortions like that Punisher cover, but to be honest that’s what Punisher specials’ covers looked like.

Not only the product looked more attractive, games themselves were a quantum leap beyond what came before, and, again, the games are not even that good, but the possibility of manipulating these characters at home (there had been some good arcade games already, Captain America and Punisher being actually ports of arcade machines) instantly renewed our faith in humanity … There were good things coming, that much was undeniable!!!

I would normally include here the cover of my favourite Megadrive game, but they’re right above. The 2 games I played the most were the first X-Men (that music, playing as Wolverine) and Captain America and the Avengers (the list of enemies alone: Klaw, the Living Laser, Whirlwind, The Sentinels, Wizard, the Grim Reaper, the Mandarin, The Juggernaut, Ultron, and Crossbones), and even if I understand that they are not even close the best Megadrive games, they still bring good memories.

Next: the far superior SNES (even though they never had the awesomeness that’s X-Men, the SNES is the first system that featured Thanos in a game and superior versions of half of the games on this list)