In the major canon of Spider-Man games there are basically only 5 worth talking about. There’s the 2000 Spider-Man on the PS1, N64, and Dreamcast, the 2004 Spider-Man 2 movie tie-in, and finally (after a 14-year gap) Insomniac’s Spider-Man trilogy. Though Insomniac gave us the definitive Spider-Man games, there are many more outside of these five titles that have fallen into obscurity. In fact, from 1989 to the release of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in 2014, there was a new Spidey game almost every single year.
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It’s easy to see why only a select few stand out. 2000’s Spider-Man was an evolution of the 2D beat-em-up Marvel games that added voice acting, a big comic book story, and impressive graphics (for the time), bringing Spider-Man’s world to life for the first time in games. Spider-Man 2 was the first open-world Spider-Man game, which planted the seed for what a Spider-Man game could one day be, and Insomniac eventually made that dream a reality.
For a number of years, Activision began to treat Spider-Man like an annual franchise similar to Call of Duty, meaning every 12 months the wall crawler got a new adventure.
The remaining Spider-Man games are just things that happened in between bigger milestones. Games like Edge of Time and Friend or Foe were born in the era of low-budget licensed games and launched so frequently that it was hard to even keep up with each new entry.
But some forgotten Spider-Man games should be remembered. They may not live up to the true classics, but a lot of Spidey games from the Activision era were filled with clever ideas, complex comic book stories, and mechanics that made them feel ahead of their time.
Ultimate Spider-Man Felt Like Playing A Comic Book
I’ve played every Spider-Man game going back to the Maximum Carnage on the Super Nintendo, and one of the games I’ve always looked back fondly on is Ultimate Spider-Man.
Launching just a year after Spider-Man 2, Ultimate Spider-Man has one of the most authentic comic book stories and aesthetics of all time. Co-directed by Brian Michael Bendis, the architect of Marvel’s Ultimate Universe, Ultimate Spider-Man was a cel-shaded open-world Spider-Man game set in the then-current continuity of the Ultimate Spider-Man comic book series.
Set a few months after the introduction of Venom to the Ultimate Universe, Ultimate Spider-Man followed Spider-Man and Venom through two separate, intersecting campaigns. It’s wild to think about a video game tie-in to a comic book series now – even one as famous as Spider-Man – but the fact we’ll never see something like that again is part of why I love this game so much. Also, Venom has never been as fun to play in any other game.
Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions Was The Original Into The Spider-Verse
2010’s Shattered Dimensions was one of the last Spider-Man games published by Activision, and also one of the best. It featured four Spider-Men from four different universes – 616 Spider-Man, Spider-Man Noir, Spider-Man 2099, and Ultimate Spider-Man – who have to find broken fragments of a magical artifact to save the multiverse.
Each universe has its own art style and unique gameplay, which makes it feel like you’re playing four Spider-Man games in one. I’ve always loved Spider-Man Noir’s black-and-white world and its emphasis on stealth. Each of the Spider-Men was portrayed by an actor who has played Spider-Man in different eras of the animated series, which added an interesting meta layer to this multiverse story. There’s also an appearance of Spider-Ham in the post-credits scene. Who would have thought all the elements of the Spider-Verse were right there all the way back in 2010?
The sequel, Edge of Time, unfortunately didn’t have the same juice.
There are other Spidey games I have a soft spot for. The 2001 sequel to the PS1 Spider-Man, Enter Electro, featured villains like Sandman, Shocker, and Hammerhead, all of whom were considered C-listers at the time, but Insomniac was clearly inspired. I also loved the 2010 mobile game Ultimate Spider-Man: Total Mayhem, which was one of the earliest console-style mobile games with on-screen buttons.
What Insomniac has done with Spider-Man is incredible and I look forward to many more years of its style of Spidey games, but there are a lot of forgotten gems in the history of Spider-Man games that deserve to be remembered.
