IN THE KNOW
» PUBLISHER: ACTIVISION
» DEVELOPER: NEVERSOFT
» RELEASED: 2000
» PLATFORM: PLAYSTATION, VARIOUS
» GENRE: ACTION
DEVELOPER HIGHLIGHTS
APOCALYPSE
RELEASED: 1998
PLATFORM: PLAYSTATION
TONY HAWK’S PRO SKATER (PICTURED)
RELEASED: 1999
PLATFORM: PLAYSTATION
GUITAR HERO III: LEGENDS OF ROCK
RELEASED: 2007
PLATFORM: PS3, VARIOUS
The story of Spider-Man began at the end of 1998, at the small Californian company Neversoft. “We had started work on a prototype for an official Star Trek: Voyager game,” Neversoft veteran and Spider-Man lead designer Chad Findley tells us. “We had Seven Of Nine move around the corridors of the ship and shoot a phaser rifle. That was already a lot of fun – but after my boss heard that Activision had the Spider-Man licence, he pushed hard for us to get it!”
Activision’s condition for granting the licence was that a 3D game had to be made with it – and since Neversoft had a powerful 3D engine available, all parties came to a quick agreement. However, according to Chad, work on the actual game design did not begin until May (featuring Bruce Willis) and had already been overhauled for use in , suddenly had to cope with very different uses. “The good thing was having a running engine base with a great animation system and no spaghetti code,” continues Chad. “Still, there were a lot of difficult parts: a completely different control system, no trigger or AI systems, no fighting core, no cutscene code, no streaming or expansive areas – and of course: no swinging and wall-crawling. This was super challenging to go from nothing to a shippable quality.” All of that had to be written from scratch by main programmer Dave Cowling, which took about six months, after which the actual game design could finally take shape.
