The Making Of: Spider-man
It’s fitting that the first Marvel videogame was created by one of the industry’s first female developers. Laura Nikolich explains how she joined Parker Brothers and brought Spider-man to the Atari 2600
Laura Nikolich on creating the first-ever Marvel console game
ideogames were a full-blown craze by the early Eighties, which made assembly coders like Laura Nikolich a precious resource. Female programmers were even rarer, and so recruiters for Parker Brothers were sceptical when they met the young graduate at a job fair. “They asked me if I knew how to do real-time assembly-level programming, and I said: ‘Well, yeah,’” Laura remembers. “They were amazed, and they scheduled me for an interview, and I got the job. My friends were saying, ‘Are you kidding me? You’re going to ruin your career!’ I was like, ‘Well it sounds fun!’”
Soon after joining Parker Brothers’ videogames division, Laura was given a high-profile licence to adapt, although not the one she had hoped for. “Spider-man was assigned to me,” Laura notes, “and everybody else was doing Star Wars, which was the big thing back then, so I was like, ‘Oh I want to do a Star Wars game!’ But I said, ‘Alright.’ I’d read a few of the Spider-man comic books as a child, although not that much. But he was a big deal, I just didn’t realise that.”
Like all Parker games, Spider-man’s design was a group effort by the firm’s games team that was then presented to its marketing department. “We got together and brainstormed how to do the game,” Laura recollects, “and then we made storyboards to show to the marketing people. They wanted Spider-man to scroll horizontally, but with the limitations of the system it made more sense to scroll vertically, and they finally agreed because we could do much better gameplay that way.”
The core gameplay devised for Spider-man involved swinging from web to web to the top of buildings, rather than crawling up them. “If I had him crawling instead of on his web it would have been way too memory intensive,” Laura explains, “I would have had to have had multiple frames of Spider-man one after another to show him moving up the building. And actually, nobody ever thought of it, because we all knew the limitations of the system.”
A secondary objective played to the strengths of Spider-man’s host hardware, where the hero caught criminals and defused bombs to replenish his limited webbing. “The tradition was that Spider-man was always catching criminals,” Laura reasons, “and you had to give players a reward for that. I also didn’t want to make it so that players could just go up in a straight line. That would have been boring! You had to make it so that players had to play the game.”
As well as connecting mechanics, Laura also added jeopardy to her game by tasking its villains with cutting Spider-man’s web, although the hero could spin more as he fell. “He was Spider-man, you know, so he had to be able to save himself!” Laura points out. “And it wasn’t hard to have him just shoot his web and snag the building, because that was in the game anyway from when he was swinging upwards. It also made the gameplay
“HE WAS SPIDERMAN, SO HE HAD TO BE ABLE TO SAVE HIMSELF! AND IT WASN’T HARD TO HAVE HIM SHOOT HIS WEB AND SNAG THE BUILDING” LAURA NIKOLICH
better, because it gave the player a way to redeem themselves.”
As well as criminals with sharp knives leaning out of skyscraper windows, Laura also gave Spider-man a supervillain boss to get past, more specifically his archenemy. “The Green Goblin was chosen mainly because of the ease of using him,” Laura acknowledges, “you couldn’t do the octopus guy because there was a small pixel set to build the opponent. Also, it was easy to use the same type of algorithm that we used for Spider-man to fly the Green Goblin around the tower. He was the last enemy before you got up to the top to defuse the super-bomb, and that was the final challenge, so he had to be tough.”
Nevertheless, a young relative of a Parker Brothers colleague found a sneaky way to breeze past the Goblin while playtesting Laura’s game. “The biggest bug that I had to fix didn’t occur to any of us while we were playing the game,” Laura grins. “One kid went over to the side of the screen and just climbed straight up into the air! He thought it was great fun. It only took me five minutes to put a hit detect in, but who would have thought?”
Having had its accidental cheat mode removed, a wave of publicity announced Spider-man’s release, which was followed by great write-ups and brisk sales. “I was thrilled!” Laura beams. “I went out and bought all of the magazines that had reviews of Spider-man in them. I thought the TV commercial was okay, although maybe a little bit overdone. But that was the marketing people.”
Reflecting on her Atari 2600 hit now, Laura wouldn’t change a thing, and she’s rightly proud that Spider-man still plays well decades after it came out. “I did the best I could with what I had, so I don’t really have any regrets,” Laura considers. “Spider-man has weathered the test of time. You can’t hold it up against the games of today, but it was the first pass at home videogames, and I’m very proud of it.”