24 years ago today, the first Spider-Man game based on the then Spider-Man movie, with a significantly expanded story, was played.
Spider-Man games have had naming issues before. For example, you could say you played a Spider-Man game and that could mean you played a game from 1982, a game from 1995, a game from 2000, or maybe a game from 2002. They were completely different games, but they were all called simply – Spider-Man. This last one from 2002 was the first Spider-Man game based on the first movie Hollywood productions, and it was played today on PC, PlayStation 2, Xbox and GameCube platforms.
This Spider-Man followed the film of the time with Tobey Maguirewho also lent his voice to the game itself. However, the story itself was broader and somewhat modified than the one in the film that appeared a few weeks later. The main antagonist here was the Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe also lent his voice to the game), but Spidey also fought other villains in the game, such as Vulture, Shocker and Kraven the Hunter.
Gameplay in gameplay it was relatively similar to the Spider-Man games from the first PlayStation, focusing on punching opponents and swinging around the city. However, as this was the first Spider-Man for the new generation of consoles at the time, the whole thing was finally done looked convincing. There was no more “fog” between the buildings, and a view of the ground revealed heavy traffic in the city. The game laid a good foundation for the later sequel, in which the idea of an open-world Spider-Man game was realized for the first time.
This game laid a good foundation for the sequel in which the idea of an open world Spider-Man game was realized.
Unlike later games, this one was also unintentionally humorous. For example, at the end of the game, Spider-Man told the player: “You’re done – go outside and play.” How much this game was a product of a different time is shown by the fact that in the initial versions you could play with a Mary Jane costume for Spider-Man, and this was later removed to avoid lesbian connotations in the scene where Mary Jane then kisses Mary Jane.
Ratings for the game were very good and Spider-Man was sold by 2006 in 2.1 million copies. It’s not much today, but at the time that’s what success looked like, especially for a linear game that was also very short (it could be completed in less than four hours). As we already wrote, the sequel took Spider-Man to a higher level and towards an open world, after which nothing was the same.
