Spider-Man has had many video games over the years, and one that isn’t well remembered is Spider-Man The Video Game from Sega. The game was a beat em up that starred Spider-man, the Black Cat, as well as the surprising choices of Hawkeye and Namor as playable characters. The latter two were rather unusual choices for a Spider-Man game, as they are not really part of his extended cast. True, Hawkeye has teamed with Spider-man but is not really connected to Spidey all that much and Namor seems out of left field and a strange pick to have. If I am being honest though, the game itself is rather unusual in its format. When the game first starts, it plays as a somewhat generic beat em up with nothing special to it, but that changes when the game screen zooms out and the gameplay switches to a format similar to the Bandai Namco title Rolling Thunder .As such, the game turned into a classic arcade side scrolling shooter than a beat em up, which was something we had not seen all that much if ever. Sega was trying something new and it was a different type of game to say the least.
I do not think the game is bad, like many others do, but it is definitely not one of the best games that Spider-Man would star in. For one thing, the game had a unique idea of inserting quarters to extend your life meter instead of getting extra lives. This ended up hurting the game a great deal since if your life was always depleting, you had no choice but to keep paying constantly. This is already a controversial idea, but considering the game itself was not especially great, this added change only served to further push people away. If the game had stuck to a more traditional style of life bar, I could see the game having done better.
Playing the game now, I see it as more of an interesting curiosity than anything else. It was released the same year that Sega put out Streets of Rage 1 on the Genesis, a game that would change how beat em ups would play going forward. In some ways, this game can be seen as one of the last of the old generation for Sega in the arcades. It had interesting visuals, although Spider-Man looked strange as he walked, but that was not enough to save it. The game remained arcade only, though I am curious as to how a port to consoles would have played. I could imagine a lot of the more controversial aspects would have been changed or removed and even the combat might have been reworked.
As the game exists, I don’t think it is one worth tracking down as it has not aged well and plays rather awkwardly. As a part of Sega’s gaming legacy however, this game should be remembered more, since even if it was not good, it was part of Sega’s experimental phase in the arcades and that should not be forgotten.
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