Green Lantern’s forgotten 2011 game already featured the Manhunters

Green Lantern: Rise of the Manhunters came out on June 7, 2011 as a tie-in to the movie, and it brought the Manhunters to mainstream DC fans years before HBO’s Lanterns did.

Set in the Ryan Reynolds Green Lantern film universe, the game puts you in control of Hal Jordan and makes the Manhunters the main threat, not Parallax.

The story picks up after the movie instead of running through it again, with the Manhunters returning to get revenge on the Guardians of the Universe and the Green Lantern Corps.

Reynolds also voices Hal Jordan and lends his likeness, so you were basically watching Ryan Reynolds’ version of the character fight the Manhunters long before Lanterns paired Kyle Chandler’s Hal Jordan with Aaron Pierre’s John Stewart.

As for the gameplay, Green Lantern: Rise of the Manhunters keeps things pretty straightforward: action-adventure combat built around using the power ring to create hard-light constructs.

HBO’s Lanterns seems to be taking the Manhunters in a very different direction, making them darker, more grounded, and more paranoid by turning them into shapeshifting synthetic aliens.

Reviews were mixed at the time, but if you’re revisiting DC’s stranger corners ahead of Lanterns, this overlooked tie-in is still worth picking up for its unusual place in Green Lantern history.

You can still look for Green Lantern: Rise of the Manhunters as that 2011 movie tie-in release.