THE HISTORY OF: SPIDER-MAN

There’s something about Peter Parker’s alter ego that has made the web-slinger one of the most iconic characters in comic books, film, television, toys and, of course, videogames. And it’s easy to argue that Spider-Man has had far greater success in gaming than any of his superhero stablemates. Aside from perhaps Batman, few comic book characters have had the same prevalence in videogames, fewer still have had the consistency.

“THAT WAS THE HEART OF THE ENTIRE GAME GETTING THE WEB, THE ARC, THE SWING”
Laura Nikolich

Spidey’s career starts towards the end of the Seventies, at which point the hero was a household name. With the ascent of gaming, Marvel was clearly on the hunt for a way to bring its hottest character over to the computer gaming market. Around the close of the Seventies Marvel had worked with Parker Brothers to create an electronic toy by the name of Rom The Spaceknight. Parker Brothers then moved into creating licensed videogames, leading to the first Spider-Man game. The task was handed to Laura Nikolich, a young programmer who had joined the growing games department of the company to develop the game for the Atari 2600. “Marvel sent me a bunch of comics and I read them and I looked at them,” says Laura, who admits she hadn’t had too much exposure to the character at that point. “The Green Goblin was a big deal, so we had the Green Goblin that was basically bothering Spider-Man a lot trying to cut his web while he was climbing the building to try and save it from a bomb. But that was about as fancy as you could get and still stay inside of 4K.” The limitations of the hardware led to the vertical scrolling of the game, which still allowed for a sense of Spider-Man scaling