18 years ago a teenage me was at my friend Kevin’s house when he’d just picked up the latest copy of the Official PlayStation Magazine, whose demo disc that month included a snippet of gameplay from Neversoft’s then-upcoming Spider-Man game.
I remember it vividly because we ended up replaying that short demo for hours. Truncated a section as it was, the sheer overwhelming joy at being to experience Spidey’s first real foray into 3D - swinging openly from rooftop to rooftop and sticking to the buildings - was revelatory, and marked the start of a lifelong love affair with Spider-Man video games (my struggles with Spider-Man vs The Kingpin on the Master System notwithstanding).
From that trailblazing PS1 title, to Treyarch’s rightfully beloved and groundbreaking open-world Spider-Man 2 movie tie-in, to polished experiences like Shattered Dimensions and the underrated Web of Shadows, there have been some outstanding virtual web slinging adventures over the years. Yet in more recent times, the wall-crawler’s digital outings have ranged from ‘phoning it in’ to ‘insultingly awful’.
