Over the last 40-something years, there have been dozens of Spider-Man video games released across nearly every console and gaming platform imaginable. While a few of those have been genuine masterpieces, most aren’t great, but they all have their own unique charm and weird quirks: from Spider-Man Vs. The Kingpin’s fully voice-acted animated cutscenes and bizarre alternate endings to the deep-cut villains of the extremely rare 32X game Web of Fire to the fact that one of the first video game appearances of Spider-Man was as a boss fight in The Revenge of Shinobi where he turned into Batman.
Join Max Scoville on a journey through some of the earliest days of Spidey’s gaming career, through several mountains of shovelware in the 8 and 16-bit eras, taking a look at how much this wall-crawler benefitted from the advent of 3D gaming. From the PS2-era tie-ins to Sam Raimi’s beloved film to Activision’s annualized releases that had to get creative without movies to gamify. Finally, the modern era of Spider-Man games under Insomniac Games, which have finally given the beloved web-slinger the video game treatment he’s always deserved.
Chapters:
00:00 - Intro
00:45 - Spider Bytes: The origin story of Spider-Man games
03:49 - Fisky Business: Spider-Man Vs. The Kingpin’s completely unhinged SEGA CD cutscenes
07:46 - Multiplatforms of Madness: Swings and misses of the 8 and 16 bit era
10:25 - Now You’re Playing With Power! (And Responsibility): Spider-Man The Animated Series gave us some of the weirdest Spidey games ever
14:10 - Spidey Goes 3D: How the studio behind Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater gave Spider-Man the same love they gave the Birdman
18:46 - Graphic Design is My Passion: WHY did the PlayStation 3 use the Spider-Man movie font???
22:08 - The End of the Tie-In: When video games cost more than movies, maybe video games based on movies aren’t the best idea
25:21 - Brand New Day: How Insomniac REALLY made us feel like Spider-Man(s)
26:29 - Outro
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