Masters of the Universe - The Super Adventure & The Arcade Game

1987 U.S. Gold

Platforms: Amstrad CPC, IBM PC, Commodore 16

Masters of the Universe – The Super Adventure and The Arcade Game were two games based on the Filmation cartoon Masters of the Universe, released by US Gold in 1987.

The games have you as He-Man, who fights to deal with the evil forces of Skeletor, who is determined to take over Eternia. The franchise has received a cult following over 40 years, culminating in the release of a new live action movie in June 2026 by MGM Amazon.

The Super Adventure is a graphic adventure on the Spectrum and C64 but text only on the BBC. The Arcade Game is an exploring game but received pretty badly – at the time, it was voted 2nd Worst Game of the year by readers of Crash magazine.

Adverts for the game indicate releases on the Amstrad, Spectrum, C64, C16, BBC Micro and IBM PC. The Arcade Game, in the same advert, mentions the CPC, C64 and Spectrum.

However, neither game came out on the Amstrad CPC for some reason and the C16 and IBM versions never came out either for the Super Adventure version. The lack of the Commodore 16 version is understandable as the C16 was a failing format, but it is interesting that the Amstrad CPC version never came out as 99% of U.S Gold’s output came out on the Amstrad.

Looking through issues of Amstrad Action, there seem to be no mention of either of these two games, nor were any adverts printed for them, only the one based on the 1987 movie (see further down in this article).

According to Spectrum Computing, Mike Woodroffe, Stefan F. Ufnowski, Graham Lilley and Teoman Irmak were behind the Spectrum versions of both games so it would be interesting to find out if they were due to code the CPC version too and if so, was anything made of it. At the time, the cartoon series had been cancelled and sales of He-Man toys were in decline but that wouldn’t explain the lack of a CPC, C16 or IBM version.

Ironically, Masters of the Universe would make it onto the CPC that same year when Gremlin Graphics released their dire game based on 1987’s Masters of the Universe live action movie starring Dolph Lundgren and Frank Langella.

FRANK: Luca has very kindly flagged in the comments that they have a page regarding the missing C16 game, which we have added the evidence they gathered into the gallery below. As you will see, the C16 edition is clearly marked in the instructions, as is the IBM PC and Amstrad editions. Can anything of them be found as a result?

With thanks to Spectrum Computing for the advert and Luca / https://plus4world.powweb.com for additional evidence of plans for the conversions and news snippets.