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In the olden days, superheroes posed a problem for games developers. Hugely popular with The Kids and indulging the very same power fantasies that games tap into, those superhuman abilities were both an alluring proposition and an impossible challenge. Spider-Man had it worst of all. In digital worlds where left, right and jump represented the limits of interaction, a character who could swing from the ceiling and crawl on any surface was beyond the rudimentary physics available at the time.So after slogging and slugging his way through a series of scrolling 16-bit beat-'em-ups, his true potential untapped, it took Tony Hawk developer Neversoft and the throbbing power of the PlayStation to bring the wall-crawler to life. The 2000 Spidey game may not have been truly open-world - and it may have found our hero swinging from webs attached to nothing above a city sheathed in perpetual fog - but it gave us our first taste of what a real Spider-Man game could be like. As consoles got more powerful, so Spidey could finally take to the concrete canyons of New York, just like he did in the comics.
The trouble is, once you hit on the perfect way to realise a superhero in a game, it becomes hard to deviate from that formula. Since Spider-Man had set up shop at Activision, never a publisher to shy away from a spot of milking, the simple thrill of swinging from Harlem to Battery Park soon became a chore. Review scores drooped and even the man responsible for signing off on the damn things was unimpressed. "Our Spider-Man games have sucked for the last five years," belched Bobby Kotick in 2010, presumably fresh from a seminar on staff motivation.
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