The Stack

The Treyarch Spider-Man games are notable for their lack of continuity with each other, even as they build on each other technically. It’s kind of like Final Fantasy that way, but a little weirder, because they’re all adapted from different versions of the Marvel universe, and feature different versions of the same characters. Their first Spider-Man was set in the “Earth-616” universe of the comics, where Spider-Man’s extensive rogues gallery is an established fact that the player is expected to be at least somewhat familiar with. ¹[15 Sept 2018] Correction: The first Treyarch Spider-Man game was in fact a tie-in game for the 2002 Spider-Man movie. The game I describe here was developed by Neversoft, not Treyarch, and released two years earlier. Both of these games are titled “Spider-Man”. Spider-Man 2 was a tie-in game for the movie of the same name. The third game is Ultimate Spider-Man, and it’s based on the Ultimate Spider-Man comics series, part of the Ultimate Marvel line. I frankly don’t know a lot about Ultimate Marvel, but my impression is that it was in part an attempt at a more accessible Marvel universe, one that wasn’t dragging four decades of confusing and ill-planned backstory behind it. Characters were simplified to their most iconic forms, or at least their most commonly-familiar ones.

As a result, Peter Parker is still in high school in this game. But he’s already an accepted part of New York’s superhero scene, with the result that other heroes can make random cameos. Johnny “Human Torch” Storm, for example, just shows up apropos of nothing early in the game to challenge Spidey to a race. Wolverine just shows up in a bar in one scene. At the same time, Peter is new enough at this that he hasn’t met very many of his villains yet. Boss fights tend to be preceded by introductions.

In particular, the designers made the very strange choice of starting the game halfway through Venom’s origin story. The intro cutscene rushes through a condensed version of the “black costume” story — the Ultimate version, in which the living-symbiote-disguised-as-a-unitard is created in a laboratory, instead of being from outer space. We hear Peter narrate how the costume enhanced his abilities and made him feel great, but we don’t get to see or experience that for ourselves. Instead, we pick things up when the symbiote first bonds with Eddie Brock.

The base concept of Venom is “Spider-Man but he’s a monster”, so playing as Venom is broadly similar to playing as Spidey, but he doesn’t quite have the same capabilities. The controls handle differently. His movements are more forceful than graceful. His climbing animation looks like it’s damaging the building. There are no “events” for Venom, no opportunities to rescue innocents. Instead, you can grab passersby with your tentacles and absorb their life essence to heal yourself. (There’s a nice little gameplay gag about this when Venom fights Wolverine in that bar I mentioned: whenever Wolverine retreats to heal himself, you have to decide whether to whack him with a tentacle to stop it or take advantage of the lull to grab a cowering biker or two.) And, generally, Venom is more powerful than Spidey, so his challenges are correspondingly more demanding. Venom is constantly under attack by heavily-armed soldiers sent to retrieve the symbiote.

Also, the Venom scenes always happen at night. For the first several days of the story, there’s a consistent pattern of: Peter goes to school; Peter goes to the Daily Bugle; there’s a supervillain fight at one of those two points; Peter goes home to Aunt May; and then it’s night and there’s a Venom sequence. And it strikes me that this structure makes a whole lot more sense for the part of the story that they skipped over: the part where the symbiote is still with Peter, and takes over his body every night to go crime-fighting without his awareness. I speculate that this was the intended design at some point in the game’s development.