Bounty Hunters of Limbo: the SilverHawks game the arcades never made

Every cartoon that sold toys in the middle of the eighties was supposed to sell a video game as well, and most of them did. ThunderCats got one from Elite Systems in 1987, fourteen side-scrolling levels of Lion-O chasing the Eye of Thundera across the home computers of the day. SilverHawks, which came out of the same Rankin/Bass offices a year later with the same story editor at the desk, got nothing on any home console, home computer or arcade cabinet. Our game concept page said so in August, and nothing has been released since: there has never been a licensed SilverHawks game on any platform.

There is a fan-made one now, and you can play it here.

SilverHawks: Bounty Hunters of Limbo was built for this site as a 16-bit arcade beat-em-up in the tradition of Final Fight and Golden Axe. It runs in the browser, it wants a keyboard, and it does not ask you to install anything.

Who you are

The roster is four, and you pick one.

Quicksilver is the balanced one and the squad leader, the character to learn the timing on. Steelheart breaks up a crowd better than anyone. Steelwill is the slowest of the four to commit and the hardest hitter on the team. Copper Kidd is the smallest and fastest of the four, and the first to go down if you let him get hit [1].

Anyone who fed coins into Final Fight will know their way around. The stage is a belt with depth, so up and down move a Hawk into or out of the screen rather than off the ground, and getting the line right is most of the skill. Double-tap to run, and a running jump goes twice as high as a standing one. Down and attack on the way back to earth gives a diving strike that knocks a Mob grunt flat; it is the newest move in the game, and the best looking. Walk into an enemy to grab him; press away and attack to throw him. Crates and barrels break open for food and for pipes, blades and batons, and those can be thrown too. And each Hawk has a bird on call for the screen-clearing special.

Where you go

In the game’s telling, Limbo is a galaxy of outlaws with one jail, and MonStar has just broken out of it. Commander Stargazer gets the best line of the opening: “I have one planet and no police.” So Earth sends its own, partly metal and partly real, and the campaign follows the Mob from the BrimStar moon all the way to the transformation chamber where Mon*Star gets his power.

That structure is the smartest decision in the game. On television MonStar draws his power from the light of the MoonStar, and week after week it is one of his specialists who actually meets the Hawks in the field, while he waits for the moon to rise. Bounty Hunters of Limbo builds its campaign the same way. Nobody meets MonStar in the first stage and chases him for fifteen; the Hawks work their way up through his lieutenants, each one bigger than the last, until MonStar is the last boss left.

Fifteen missions make up the ladder, plus a bonus salvage run on the Bedlama docks. Besides the street fights there are rescues on Penal Planet 10, an escort through the Fence black market, a survival hold in Bedlama with the lights out, a chase through the Starship Casino, and a stand at the Artificial Sun. And four of them take the Hawks off the ground altogether: Wing Command, Meteor Maze, Dead Orbit and Fortress Run turn the game into a side-scrolling shooter [2].

Who you fight

Buzz-Saw waits on the moon with his blade arm spinning. Mumbo Jumbo runs the forge floor on Automata. Hardware is a squat bulldog under a weapons harness, and Mo-Lec-U-Lar is built out of gold spheres that come apart and put themselves back together behind you, the way he did on the show. Melodia fights with her keytar, and her chord spans the whole arena, so the only answer is to jump it!

Every one of them changes when their health drops by half, and MonStar changes the most. He stands two heads taller than Quicksilver and comes in with a claw, an overhead slam that sends a shockwave along the floor, a lunge, and a roar that clears the space around him. Then he turns: the armour goes on, the beam comes out, and the words MONSTAR ENRAGED fill the top of the screen.

What it is, and what it is not

This is a fan project made for silverhawks.tv, it is not for sale, and it has nothing to do with the rights holder. It is also an early pilot. Expect rough edges, placeholder art and balance that has not settled, and know that your progress saves in your own browser, so clearing your site data clears your campaign. The character sprites and backgrounds were made with an image model and then post-processed, and the game page says so in its credits, as this page does in its lead caption [3].

But it is the first SilverHawks game anyone has been able to play! If you found the dive strike too late, or could not get past Melodia, say so in the comments; that is what the next build gets fixed from.

The squad on the shelf

If the game sends you looking for the Hawks in plastic, Super7’s ULTIMATES line has all four of the playable squad, and all four were in stock at Big Bad Toy Store when we checked on 15 September 2026. The Quicksilver ULTIMATES figure is in stock at $27.50, 50% off at Big Bad Toy Store, and Steelheart is in stock at $22.00, 60% off. Steelwill is in stock at $30.24, 45% off, and the cartoon-deco Copper Kidd is in stock at $69.49. For the final boss, Mon*Star in his toy colours is in stock at $67.99, 20% off, and the rest of the line is in Super7’s SilverHawks range at Big Bad Toy Store.

Nobody at Rankin/Bass or Kenner ever built this game. But the show had already supplied most of it: a villain who draws his power from the Moon*Star, a Mob of specialists to send in ahead of him, and a squad of Hawks with a bird each.

Notes

[1] Bluegrass is in the fiction, and the opening narration has Earth sending “five of its own”, but he is not playable in this build and sits the campaign out. The companion birds are Tally-Hawk for Quicksilver, Stronghold for Steelheart, Rayzor for Steelwill and Mayday for Copper Kidd.

[2] The flight stages are the ones the in-game mission list files as flight and trench runs: Wing Command and Meteor Maze in the upper atmosphere and the Gravestone Belt, Dead Orbit at the Limbo gun platform, and Fortress Run on the approach to the Mob’s command fortress.

[3] The series tagline is “partly metal, partly real”, and it sits on the game’s title screen under the logo. The concept mockups that started all this, and the sign-up list for anyone willing to test a future build, are still on the game concept page.