The Making Of: Spider-man Vs Th7e4kingpin
Aside from a trio of well-received graphic adventures, Marvel Comics didn’t have the greatest of success with videogames during the Eighties. At the dawn of the Nineties, however, a contract with Sega Of America to publish a Spider-man game for the-then cutting-edge Mega Drive seemed like a sure thing. Unfortunately, Sega’s first choice of developer – an east coast outfit called Innerprise Software – failed to make progress quickly enough, and so the Spider-man licence was handed over to the west coast developer Technopop, which although starting from scratch, made real headway before internal and intercompany disputes resulted in the firm imploding. With time in short supply, former Technopop coder Burt Sloane was asked to take on the licence himself, although as developer Jon Miller explains, Burt soon saw the benefits of having a partner. “Burt was roommates with my brother Mark, who was working on the music and sound effects for the game,” Jon begins. “I was on the east coast in Boston, and they were in San Francisco. I had been talking to my brother, he’d been telling me about what he was doing, and it sounded a lot more fun
than what I was doing. After the Technopop split up, Burt was the only programmer, and he thought he needed some help.”
Soon after Jon joined Burt, however, it became apparent that Technopop had made more progress on some aspects of the Spider-man licence than others, with the result that its levels and gameplay fell short of its beautifully animated, comic book-faithful lead character, not to mention the game’s eastern inspiration. “I contracted with Sega to help get it out the door,” Jon recalls, “but it hadn’t been optimised to ship – it wasn’t hitting its target framerate, it didn’t fit into the cartridge size allocated to the game and at the same time it wasn’t large enough. One of the inspirations was the Revenge Of Shinobi game that came out of Japan. That was just a really slick, beautifullydone, beautifully-tuned side-scrolling game; that was the inspiration for how things should work.”
The daunting challenge of elevating the quality of Sega’s Spider-man project while at the same time expanding its world and reducing its file size didn’t go unnoticed by the game’s developer turned producer Ed Annunziata, who responded by pitching in. “Burt had made these tools for the Macintosh,” Jon notes. “His previous gig had been working with Apple in the Mac group, so he was familiar with doing GUIS. There was a level editor that let you quickly scroll around, zoom in and out, copy and paste regions of tiles, and attach collision and enemy information graphically. So he gave a copy of these tools to Ed, and Ed helped expand the size of some of the levels.”
One outcome of this focus on level design was the realisation that Spidey’s signature moves suited different environments, so stages became increasingly tailored to certain abilities. “There were plenty of levels – like the initial warehouse scene – were there were a lot of vertical walls and platforms that you had to jump between,” Jon observes. “You could swing, but it moved you too fast and without enough control, so you ended up crawling. There was a lot of serendipity; it was difficult to plan that out on paper. And so you built stuff with what you thought was going to work with the mechanics and you would try it.”
A key mechanic in Spider-man’s evolving Mega Drive debut was based on his uncanny ability
to spin webs and swing from them, which seems like a developer’s dream but actually caused a few nightmares. “One of the things that was great was the ‘swinging from the web’ mechanic,” Jon enthuses. “It was pretty cool; it was something that was unusual, and I think it worked well, but the problem was that it allowed you to traverse huge distances very quickly. So you could jump and swing over everything, and that was a little bit of a challenge. So Ed took the sewer scene, and he kept adding regions off to the sides to swing into.”
Of course, the ever-expanding sewer level required opponents for Spider-man to fight, which ranged from mutants to alligators. The stage finished with a supervillain boss, in keeping with all of the other levels in the evolving game. “Obviously the villains in the comic books lent themselves beautifully to being the bosses in the game,” Jon points out. “There were some places where there were obvious things you could do, like the Lizard could swing around and swat with his tail – so that gave a nice, quick distance attack. And then Electro – he could squat down and electrify the girders, which was also a great foil for the ‘sticking to walls’ mechanic.”
As well as systems based on Spider-man’s abilities, an additional mechanism was devised using static sprites and background tiles, which took inspiration from Peter Parker’s talent for taking shots of his battles as Spidey and selling them for web-fluid money. “The storyline was interesting in that Peter Parker was a photographer,” Jon reflects, “so was there a way to pull that into the game mechanics? And then it was also just a cool technical thing to be able to do. The Mega Drive was not a bit-map machine, so what Burt did for the photos was actually a lot more complex. I think that was a kind of surprise when you were playing the game and saw the photo get captured like that.”
A second surprise awaited players in the form of a gruelling finale involving the dramatic rescue of Spider-man’s girlfriend and a brutal showdown with the criminal genius underpinning the plot in Spidey’s inaugural Mega Drive title – the Kingpin, the difficulty of which Jon puts down to expediency. “There was one number somewhere that said how many times you had to hit a boss, and you could turn that up high. It wasn’t necessarily the most satisfying way of creating difficulty, but you wanted your final boss to be the most spectacular of your efforts and the hardest