My home, my playground, my responsibility – Spider-Man 2

[For a guest post I am once again pleased to hand over to excellent writer and Spider-Man fan Shaun Musgrave, who last appeared here writing about Onimusha. Shaun posts at Post Game Content and on twitter as @ShaunMusgrave.

This post was written and scheduled prior to the recent revelations about the extent of abuse at Activision Blizzard. After consideration, and on the basis that the game is not currently available in any form that financially benefits Activision, we have decided to proceed.]

**Spider-Man 2** (Treyarch/Activision, PlayStation 2, 2004)

Licensed games have a bit of a reputation for being hit or miss in terms of quality. Games based on movies in particular typically have to meet a very strict deadline and as a result tend to be unambitious, unfinished, or both. More than two decades after his video game debut on the Atari 2600, Spider-Man hadn’t had a great deal of luck in the hobby. Part of that was down to the license being held by a publisher of dubious quality for many years. Acclaim, through its LJN label, had taken several swings at the character and really only found much luck by inserting him into a somewhat generic beat-em-up.

But we can’t blame it all on the Rainbow. Top-tier publishers like SEGA and Capcom turned out some decent games featuring the wallcrawler, but nothing that had truly captured the character’s full range of abilities and personality. One of the big problems was that of technology. Every superhero has their own powers and abilities, and some of those are more well-suited than others for 2D games. Spider-Man is a hero whose powers focus on mobility. He swings through the streets and skyscrapers of New York like Tarzan making his way through an urban jungle. He can climb almost any surface, uses his webs to create all manner of constructs, and fights less like a boxer and more like a pinball. 2D Spider-Man games were always a compromise, often giving you his abilities but rarely giving you any reasons to use them.

Things started to pick up when Activision took over the license and released its PlayStation Spider-Man game in 2000. The move to 3D allowed Spider-Man to swing from rooftop to rooftop, finally offering a proper sense of scale to the character’s trademark maneuvers. The 3D spaces also gave players a Spidey’s-eye view of what it was like to climb the walls and stick to ceilings, provided the camera was feeling cooperative. A simple narrative gimmick explained why Spidey had to stick to the rooftops: poison gas filled the streets, which would put an end to our hero if he tried to swing too low. We understood the real reason, of course. But it made sense.

In a fortunate turn of events, Activison had obtained the Spider-Man license just as the brand was about to get even hotter. The Spider-Man movie, long stuck in a legal quagmire, had finally had its issues sorted out and was on its way to theaters in May of 2002. The developer of the PlayStation game, Neversoft, was busy tending its white-hot Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater brand, leaving the game based on the movie (again called Spider-Man) to the relatively untested Treyarch. Understandably, the developer stuck fairly closely to the template Neversoft had laid out with the 2000 game, with one interesting addition: aerial combat. While there were still plenty of indoor sections, a greater percentage of the game was set outdoors. More fights on rooftops, mid-air battles against flying foes, and gameplay that covered a bigger range of elevation.

With the power of the new generation of consoles, the game also looked dazzling. Plenty of buildings surrounded you at all times, making it feel like you were in a city rather than a video game set. Now you could see all the way down to the streets, with the little cars driving on the roads helping you understand just how high you were. But there was one problem, one that came up often in evaluations of the game. With no narrative excuse, players couldn’t help but wonder why they couldn’t go down to those streets they could so clearly see. Any attempts to go too low would send Spidey right back up. Why? As before, we understood the real reason, but it chafed so much more here for lack of an explanation.

That’s a lot of preamble, I realize. But it’s important to set the scene for why Spider-Man 2 was such a massive hit and a real game-changer for superhero video games. More experienced and perhaps more confident, Treyarch dealt with that question everyone had been asking with a response that could only happen in a post-Grand Theft Auto III world. Why couldn’t Spider-Man go down to those streets and walk among the cars? Wouldn’t that be cool? And why do things halfway? Of all of Marvel’s characters, Spider-Man has always had one of the stronger connections to his homebase of Manhattan. So if we’re going to go so far as to give Spider-Man the freedom to swing from the streets to the tops of skyscrapers, why not let him do that in a faithful rendition of the Big Apple? No invisible walls, just the natural aquatic barriers of the real city.

This couldn’t have been an easy decision for the developer or the publisher. The hardware of the time had to rely on streaming the city as players made their way through it, something that was more challenging with Spider-Man’s speed and vertical capabilities when compared to, say, Claude of Grand Theft Auto III. It was a very ambitious idea and the deadline was the movie’s June 30th, 2004 release date. There would be little time for do-overs if things didn’t work. Indeed, just a few months before the game was scheduled to release, it was clear that there wouldn’t be time to fit everything that was planned. Significant cuts were made, including a major underground area of the city that would have taken players through the sewers. Missions and storylines were removed, some of which would reappear in the next game.

Perhaps a grim sign for the game, were it not for the fact that the heart of the game stayed completely intact. From the second you shot your first web-line at the behest of Bruce Campbell and went zipping off the rooftop, arcing down into the busy streets, maybe even crashing into a building and bouncing off of it, the game had you. The combination of a massive city with familiar sights and a pitch-perfect means of navigating it was a package that could not be denied. There was real depth to the web-swinging, too. Spider-Man moved with proper pendulum physics, and you had to understand when to pump your legs and release your web-line to maximize your speed and distance. The web-lines had to attach to something, so if you wanted to go straight you had to balance between left and right shots. Heaven help you if you were in the middle of Central Park.

After getting comfortable with the basics, you might realize you can run along the sides of buildings, just like in the movie. You can grab flagpoles and streetlights, swinging around them like a set of monkey bars to get more altitude or simply come to a dramatic stop. You could attach a line to a helicopter flying overhead and use it to get to the Statue of Liberty. The city itself held many secret icons to collect, races to challenge, and other fun things to find. Random events would happen as you traveled about, allowing you to swoop in and save the day. It perhaps could have used more of them, as the frequent lost balloon incidents demonstrated all too well. Still, stopping along your route to stop a purse-snatcher, returning it to a thankful citizen, and then soaring off into the sky to continue on your way is about as perfect a Spider-Man experience as a fan could ask for.

My personal experience with this game involves obtaining my copy a few days earlier though only slightly nefarious means. Not wanting to spoil the film’s story for myself, I wouldn’t let myself trigger even the first cut-scene. I spent several hours just cruising around the city, stopping random crimes and checking out every inch of the urban playground Treyarch had built. I did what probably every new player of the game did and climbed to the top of the Empire State Building. Looking out at the city from my impossible perch, I then leapt off the building, speeding like a bullet as the ground got closer, only to catch myself with a web at the last second and go flying down the street. The NPCs weren’t programmed to react to things like that, but I could imagine a scene just like it happening in the movies and comics. I was in love, and I hadn’t even touched the first mission.

One of the things that a player is looking for from a licensed game is to feel like they are that character, inhabiting that character’s world. For all of Spider-Man 2‘s faults, it fully delivered on that experience in a way that no other game based on the character quite matched until Insomniac’s 2018 game. Most subsequent Spider-Man titles would cut the complexity of the web-swinging system to make it more accessible, perhaps a good change for some players but also a loss for others. All subsequent Spider-Man titles would be compared to this one. The combat wasn’t that hot, the actual story missions were rough and sometimes unpleasant in their jankiness, and the city buildings were often simple silhouettes due to the limitations of the hardware. Not one bit of that mattered, because for the first time ever in a video game, you were Spider-Man.