Spider-Man is arguably Marvel's best known franchise and is also one of the most prolific superheroes in video gaming, having appeared in over 25 titles. Still, like most superheroes, everyone's favorite web-slinger has seen his mileage vary from game to game, and those ups and downs are something Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick is acutely aware of.
"Our Spider-Man games have sucked for the last five years," said Kotick in the February 2010 issue of Game Informer [thanks ShackNews]. "They are bad games. They were poorly rated because they were bad games. We went away from what is Spider-Man. It's about web-slinging. If you don't do web-slinging right, what is the fantasy of Spider-Man?"
This response was prompted when Blizzard executives were curious about how a “kids game” would receive a Metacritic review score of 80. "The producers said, 'Well, it's a kid's game, you don't get the best ratings on a kid's game because reviews aren't going to review them as favorably, so if you look at them objectively an 80 is actually a good rating for a kid's game or movie game,'" explained Kotick. "I remember walking out of the meeting saying, 'Why would we make an 80-rated game?' Even adjusting for genre. I was thinking that when we did the great Spider-Man PlayStation game, we got a 95 rating. You can make a great game."
Although Kotick's dating is probably relative, the last five years do not include Spider-Man 2, which is based around the movie of the same title that many consider to be the best Spider-Man game ever made. The three most recent game entries for Spider-Man include Spider-Man 3, Spider-Man: Friend or Foe and Spider-Man: Web of Shadows, none of which were critically acclaimed.
While it's currently unknown what studio is making the next Spider-Man game, it is rumored that Radical Entertainment (creators of the open-world superpower title Prototype) have been tapped for the role. Shaba Games, creator of the most recent Spider-Man title, was closed in October 2009.
2 Comments
January 20, 2010
Why is he complaining when he doesn't even play his own company's games?
January 20, 2010
how do you know that?