The game hadn’t been in development for long before the CES promo tape was ready, and Sunsoft couldn’t show much more than the splash screen and cutscenes. That didn’t stop the studio from dishing out the hyperbole, though. It claimed this was the first game to include “movie footage and interactive graphics technology,” and bragged that this would be the “most amazingly lifelike” home console game you’d ever seen. No one was going to mistake this for the 1984 movie, of course, but Sunsoft was clearly hoping that cinematic look would sell copies.

The developer reportedly lost the license after the game basically abandoned the movie plot. Instead of Sarah Connor escaping the T-800 with the help of Kyle Reese, it had Reese fighting Terminators in a Skynet-controlled future.

You may know the rest of the story. Sunsoft’s big movie tie-in at the time would be Batman, and the first Terminator game was Bethesda’s 1990 first-person PC title. The first console games didn’t surface until 1992, well after T2: Judgment Day hit theaters. Still, it’s interesting to imagine what would have happened had Sunsoft kept the license. While the NES release might not have blown anyone away (Silius wasn’t a timeless classic), it might have set a different tone for Terminator games going forward.