SilverHawks got a fan-made arcade game. Should ThunderCats be next?

Should a show that already had a video game get a second one, made by its fans?

ThunderCats went to air in 1985 and became a hit for Rankin/Bass, and SilverHawks followed in September 1986 out of the same offices, animated by the same Pacific Animation Corporation crews in Japan, with Peter Lawrence moving over from the ThunderCats story editor’s chair to run it. He has said as much himself. Writing for silverhawks.tv this month, he called Mon*Star “Probably too much of an extension in character of Mumm-Ra, my ThunderCats favourite”.

The Cats got a video game out of their success. Elite Systems put Lion-O through fourteen side-scrolling levels after the Eye of Thundera in 1987, on the Spectrum, the Commodore 64, the Amstrad, the Atari ST and the Amiga. The Hawks never got one at all. Forty years later, our sister site has made one itself.

What silverhawks.tv built

It is called SilverHawks: Bounty Hunters of Limbo, it is a 16-bit arcade beat-em-up in the shape of Final Fight and Golden Axe, and it plays free in the browser at silverhawks.tv. There is a full write-up over there.

You pick one of four Hawks: Quicksilver is balanced and leads the squad, Steelheart soaks up a crowd, Steelwill hits hardest and moves slowest, and Copper Kidd is fast and fragile.

The stage is a belt with depth, so up and down move a Hawk through the scene rather than off the ground. A running jump goes twice as high as a standing one, and pressing down and attack on the way back to earth gives a diving strike that flattens whoever is underneath. Crates break open for pipes, blades and batons; enemies can be grabbed and thrown; and each Hawk’s bird is on call for a special that clears the screen.

There are fifteen missions and a bonus stage, and besides the street fights there are rescues, an escort, a survival hold with the lights out, a casino chase, and four stages where the game turns into a side-scrolling shooter and the Hawks take to the air.

The ladder, and the villain at the top of it

The best idea in the game is the order of its bosses. You do not chase Mon*Star through every stage; you climb his organisation one lieutenant at a time. Buzz-Saw waits on the moon, Mumbo Jumbo runs a forge floor, Hardware and Mo-Lec-U-Lar come after, and Melodia fights with a keytar whose chord fills the arena until you learn to jump it. Every boss changes at half health.

MonStar stands two heads taller than Quicksilver, and when his first health bar runs out he puts the armour on, the words MONSTAR ENRAGED fill the screen, and the fight starts again. Mumm-Ra has been doing the same thing since 1985, and he needs a chant to do it.

So, should thundercats.org build one?

Here is where we would like your help.

The case for is mostly Mumm-Ra. A boss fight that changes at half health suits a villain who begins as a withered mummy in a sarcophagus and ends as the Ever-Living, and the moment he rises from his sarcophagus and says “Ancient spirits of evil, transform this decayed form to Mumm-Ra, the Ever-Living!” is where a second health bar would start. The roster maps onto the Hawks’ four types: Lion-O as the balanced leader, Panthro as the heavy, Cheetara as the fast one who cannot take a hit, with Tygra left to argue about [1]. The show already has the locations, from the Berbil village to Castle Plun-Darr, and the Mutants and the Lunataks between them make a ladder of lieutenants at least as long as Mon*Star’s. As for the screen-clearing special, somebody is going to ask for Snarf!

The case against is also fair. ThunderCats had its licensed game in 1987, and a fan-made game suits silverhawks.tv because nobody else ever made a SilverHawks game; on this site it would be the second ThunderCats game, after Elite’s. There is also the art. The SilverHawks game’s sprites and backgrounds were made with an image model and then post-processed, and labelled as such, and AI art is a live argument in fandoms, this one included [2]. A ThunderCats version would have to win over the fans here who object to AI art.

There is no plan yet. What we want is a count, the same thing silverhawks.tv asked for on its game concept page. Play Bounty Hunters of Limbo first, then tell us in the comments: does the brawler suit the Cats, who would you pick first, and which Mutant belongs at the end of stage one?

The Hawks, and the Cats, on the shelf

If the game has you after the figures, Super7 has the four playable Hawks in its ULTIMATES line, all in stock at Big Bad Toy Store when we checked on 15 September 2026: Quicksilver at $27.50, 50% off, Steelheart at $22.00, 60% off, Steelwill at $30.24, 45% off, and the cartoon-deco Copper Kidd at $69.49. The boss is there too: Mon*Star in his toy colours, in stock at $67.99, 20% off. And the roster our hypothetical game would need is in Super7’s ThunderCats ULTIMATES range.

silverhawks.tv built a game for the show that never had one. Whether thundercats.org should build the next one is up to you, and the comments are open.

Notes

[1] Tygra’s whip and his trick of turning invisible do not fit a belt brawler as easily as Panthro’s nunchucks or Cheetara’s staff. He may need a move set of his own, which the SilverHawks game avoids by giving all four Hawks one shared move table with different stats.

[2] Our AI Creators section exists because fans are building ThunderCats and SilverHawks work with these tools, and we credit and label all of it. The SilverHawks game carries the same label in the credits on its own page.