The Kingpin (1990)Īs Spider-Man entered the 90s, he found himself starring in three different games for three different platforms. Its style, combat and level design came to represent much of the web-slinger’s future outings and was the first of his games to dive head first into the action side of the superhero genre. It was hugely successful, however, the company behind the game went bankrupt shortly after developing it and couldn’t follow up on plans to create more games in a similar vein.Īnother prominent title during the 80’s came in The Amazing Spider-Man and Captain America in Dr Doom’s Revenge! A side-scrolling beat em up centred around its two titular heroes, this collaborative effort was not only impressive due to how unbelievably cheesy its name is – seriously, that’s some pure 80’s cheese – but also through the template it set for Spider-Man games going forward. A text-based adventure that allowed players to input commands, Questprobe saw players take the role of the web-slinging superhero as he attempted to thwart Mysterio and a host of other villains. The first of these titles was released in 1984 under the name Questprobe: Featuring Spider-Man.
Although it may have been simple, it had enough influence to put in place an investable franchise for the wall-crawler as well as kickstarting a long history of video-game brilliance to come.įollowing Atari’s success with Spider-Man, a slew of varying adaptations followed in its midsts. It put an emphasis on Spider-Man’s web-slinging and naturally ingrained traversal mechanics, while it was also the first game to ever feature a Marvel-licensed character. Using Spider-Man’s webs and wall-crawling abilities, the goal was to fire strings of web both vertically and diagonally to manoeuvre the web-slinger up the building while avoiding Spidey’s menacing green counterpart, his eerily identical henchman and the bombs he’d laid in his path.Īlthough it appears dated now, Spider-Man’s debut introduced a lot of what made the web-slinger’s later appearances so special. Clearly inspired by the medium-defining gameplay of Donkey Kong, the player was tasked with climbing a vibrant yellow tower rigged to explode by Spider-Man’s arch-nemesis, The Green Goblin. With the success of the web-slinging superhero in the comic world, The Parker Brothers (a major American toy and game manufacturer at the time) decided to bring Spider-Man to Atari 2600s all over the world, in turn, setting in motion a video game trend that would last for decades to come. Like most major icons of the video game industry, Spider-Man’s legacy on consoles spawns from humble origins.
With Insomniac Games taking the reins in their newly released – and critically acclaimed- new take on the superhero, it’s worth swinging back to see how your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man came to be a staple of modern video game history. Since his days on the Atari, he’s featured on near every major console the industry has put on the market – the gameplay that has become synonymous with Spider-Man evolving with every new platform he’s found a home on.Īs he’s grown in the medium of video games, we’ve seen the teenage superhero be handled by various studios and development teams some treating him well and others making a mockery of his name. While these are all fair answers, one name that people often forget to mention is a certain web-slinging superhero who’s been spearheading defining video games for over thirty-five years.ĭespite his prominent standing in both the comic and feature film worlds, Spider-Man is as much a dominant video game icon as any of Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo’s retrospective mascots. Some may say the moustached plumber that dominates Nintendo’s first-party, others may land on Xbox’s notorious khaki green space marine, and some will definitely sing the praises of a certain wise-cracking adventurer belonging to Sony. If you were asked to think of the most iconic video game characters of the past three decades, chances are you’d fall on the same handful of culprits.
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