Spider-Man and Batman are about to appear alongside each other in the comics again. DC’s upcoming The Cosmic Kiss Caper & Other Stories, arriving September 8, 2026, will be the first major DC/Marvel crossover collection in more than two decades, bringing Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, Deadpool, and other heroes and villains together in a new adventure. The crossover is once again being treated like a historic publishing event. But back in 1989, Sega pulled the exact same trick in a Genesis game and genuinely did not care about the copyright complications.
The Game That Had No Business Being That Wild
The Revenge of Shinobi launched on the Sega Genesis in 1989. Players controlled a ninja, Joe Musashi, as he carved through waves of criminals with shuriken and steel. The game was excellent on its own merits: composer Yuzo Kashiro’s layered stereo soundtrack was a revelation for anyone upgrading from an NES, the game required real skill, and the boss design was… crazy.
In The Revenge of Shinobi, you can actually fight a soldier that looks like John Rambo and a boss who throws cars before his skin peels back to reveal a Terminator exoskeleton. Heck, you even fight Godzilla. Sega was clearly building a greatest hits of everything they loved about American pop culture at the time and embedding it directly into their game, legal departments be damned.
But Stage 6 was something else.
When Spider-Man Drops From the Ceiling
The Metamorphomer is a mysterious shape-shifting ninja, and the fight starts with him crawling along the ceiling above you, firing three nets down to slow your movement before descending to attack. In the original 1989 release, that form is unambiguously Spider-Man: the red-and-blue suit, the web-slinging, all of it.
But after you deal enough damage to Metamorphomer, he actually transforms into a winged bat-like creature surrounded by bats that swoops across the screen. That form is obviously Batman.
At the time, Sega had no actual licences for these characters, and later versions of the game had to be revised to tweak many of the obvious cameos.
Of course, the audacity of it is almost admirable. Marvel and DC are two of the biggest IP holders in entertainment history, and Sega just put both of their flagship characters into the same boss fight, on a home console, in 1989. The Revenge of Shinobi’s Metamorphomer has become a legend.
The Patchwork History of What Came Next
A couple of years after the original release, Sega actually acquired a licensing agreement with Marvel to create the 1991 game Spider-Man vs. The Kingpin, which meant the Spider-Man portion of the Metamorphomer fight was eventually legitimised. Later versions even credited Spider-Man with a copyright notice on the title screen.
The Batman half was a different story entirely. The Batman portion of the fight saw Spider-Man replaced by a random winged monster. Sega could not secure the DC licence. So from the second revision of the game onwards, the second form was redesigned to resemble Devilman, the Go Nagai character.
The Rambo-lookalike lost his likeness too: later versions replaced him with a bald soldier who bears no resemblance to Sylvester Stallone. Godzilla got swapped out for an inside-out skeleton dinosaur. The Revenge of Shinobi kept shedding popular characters revision by revision.
Given the limited nature of the Marvel licensing agreement, Revenge of Shinobi was blocked from re-release for years because of the boss fight. Eventually, versions released on Nintendo’s Virtual Console and on Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network in 2009 and 2012, were cleared by replacing the Spider-Man sprite with a bright pink palette swap. If you pick up The Revenge of Shinobi today, you’ll see a pink ninja in his place.
The Multiverse Was Always There
In 2026, DC and Marvel’s official crossover, The Cosmic Kiss Caper, is a 224-page event with Grant Morrison, Mark Waid and Jim Cheung. This might be official, but you’ve got to love that SEGA actually did it in such a unique way before.
If DC and Marvel were really smart, they’d add The Metamorphomer in the middle of the chaos. It would be such a funny and cool Easter egg. But that’s just my opinion. Knowing them, they’d probably add the lame pink ninja version of the character.
The pink ninja version is an embarrassment by comparison. Find a way to play the original.
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