Nobody Remembers The DC Video Game That Introduced Lanterns' Villains
Remember that time Ryan Reynolds’ Green Lantern fought the Manhunters? Probably not.
The latest episode of Lanterns finally teased a season-spanning threat that had been alluded to in the HBO show’s trailers: The Manhunters. Having appeared in Green Lantern comics since the 1970s, these shapeshifters are the precursors to the Green Lantern Corps, but were replaced after they rebelled against the Guardians of the Universe. With overarching themes of replacement and succession permeating Lanterns, the Manhunters are a genius fit for an antagonist.
But what if I told you Ryan Reynolds’ Green Lantern beat Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre to the punch? Yes, that infamous rendition of Hal Jordan did square off against the Manhunters once in a story about succession. No, you’re not misremembering the plot of the 2011 movie; its tie-in video game featured the Manhunters as its major threat.
A week before the ill-fated Green Lantern hit theaters in 2011, Double Helix Games and WB Games released Green Lantern: Rise of the Manhunters for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. It’s a pretty shameless God of War clone, featuring less-than-stellar voice work from Reynolds and other actors from the movie to shepherd players through an adventure that can be completed in just a few hours. At the time, Rise of the Manhunters came off as boring and uninspired. In retrospect, the best thing this game did was tease us with the Manhunters, 15 years before Lanterns did.
Remembering Green Lantern: Rise of the Manhunters
Rise of the Manhunters kicks off with the funeral of Abin Sur, the Lantern who previously wore Hal Jordan’s power ring, on the Corps’ home planet of Oa. Amon Sur, the son of Abin, is in attendance alongside Hal, Kilowog, and a still-good Sinestro, but they are all blindsided by an attack from the Manhunters. Lots of Green Lanterns die during the siege, and it turns out the Manhunters were seeking out a yellow lantern battery source that the Guardians were keeping hidden deep within Oa.
This sets Reynolds’ Hal Jordan off on a quest to a couple of different planets to stop the Manhunters and learn who betrayed the Corps to reveal the hidden yellow battery. After a lot of fairly repetitive button-mashing fights, Hal connects the dots to discover that Amon Sur was behind the plot, as he was angry to not be chosen as Abin Sur’s successor. Hal ultimately defeats them, cementing himself as the premier Green Lantern in this ill-fated universe.
It’s not the most complex plot, and in actuality the Manhunters serve as little more than enemy fodder rather than the body-snatcher type threat they are in Lanterns. Still, I can appreciate that Double Helix understood that the Manhunters work best in Green Lantern stories about succession, birthright, and the anxieties that surround that. Licensed games like Rise of the Manhunters are often overlooked and forgotten over time, but can retrospectively be prescient or incisive in ways that people may not expect.
Rise of the Manhunters is certainly more interesting than the terrible movie it’s based on, and shockingly beat Lanterns to the punch with a thematically fitting Manhunter threat by over a decade and a half. No one remembers Rise of the Manhunters because it’s otherwise an exasperatingly uninteresting game, but it will always have that.
It’s not really worth tracking down a PS3 or Xbox 360 copy of Green Lantern: Rise of the Manhunters to play through the game, but you might have a better-than-expected time watching a compilation of the game’s cutscenes. If you aren’t already watching Lanterns on HBO or HBO Max each Sunday, that’s really what’s worth tuning into as we await to see how the Manhunters threat unfolds.