Getting the swing with 'Spider-Man 2'
Video game producer says follow-up's new moves expand play
By Sid Lipsey
CNN Headline News
(CNN) -- Big Video Game Hunting contacted Bill Dugan to discuss the creation of the "Spider-Man 2" video game.
Dugan is an executive producer with Treyarch, which developed "Spider-Man 2" with Activision.
BIG VIDEO GAME HUNTING: Like the makers of the movie, you were under enormous pressure to create a follow-up to a highly successful original. How did you approach that monumental task?
DUGAN: It was a tall order. The first step: We talked to a lot of people about what they liked and didn't like about the game play in the first game.
The most frequent comment was that in the first game Spider-Man's webs went straight up into the air and didn't really attach to anything. It was fun, but it was a little bit like walking or jogging straight ahead, though it was in midair.
Then the movie came out, and everyone saw Spider-Man swinging around New York City so fast, turning corners like a roller coaster and having a great, thrilling time. We wanted to have that thrill as a core part of game play in the "Spider-Man 2" game.
So we took a risk and spent most of the team's time for several months working on a new swinging mechanic that was purely speculative. We made some false starts, but after a few months we had this new swinging system you see in "Spider-Man 2," using pendulum physics with a lot of little physics "cheats" to make the swinging feel real, yet not so perfectly physically accurate that you're bumping into walls all the time when you make minor mistakes. We're very proud of it and think it feels great.
After our swinging prototype, we were confident that just moving the character around would be really fun, which unlocks a lot of other fun things to do based on the movement -- like our trick races, where you have an obstacle course to run through at maximum speed, over and around the skyscrapers.
We received script revisions from Columbia and worked out a plot that echoed the movie's plot, while adding extra content from the Marvel universe to give a broader game experience and let us fill up the big city better.
BIG VIDEO GAME HUNTING: What changes did you make in this game? How is it different from "Spider-Man 1"? And what elements of the previous game were you determined to keep in this one?
DUGAN: [Swinging] was the big change -- just the way you move Spider-Man around in the game. Another big change was our "streaming city," where you can visit any part of Manhattan, and swing all the way from one end to the other without having to wait for a "Loading" screen.
This involved a large amount of technology development; the streaming code affected everything else in the game. And when we created the big city, we also had to create a lot of stuff for Spider-Man to do, so we came up with our systems of random street crimes for Spider-Man to notice and solve, and voluntary missions where Spider-Man can notice a window washer hanging off a building, needing to be rescued within a few seconds.
Our combat system is also different; there are combos, of course, but combos can chain into each other, and it can really look awesome when Spider-Man is taking on a whole gang of street thugs.
BIG VIDEO GAME HUNTING: Once again, the Manhattan locales are breathtakingly realistic. I think I even saw my favorite reading spot in Central Park depicted in your game. Can you talk a little about that?
DUGAN: We had a team of 3-D artists who made every building "by hand" in a 3-D program. They used as reference street maps, satellite maps and some 3-D perspective city maps of Manhattan.
The city had to be compressed to one-fourth of its actual size horizontally ... but we tried to be accurate when building the city. One thing we had to do in some neighborhoods was to increase the buildings' average height, so the player would have fun swinging around -- Spider-Man's web anchor points are supposed to be high if the player's going to be able to accelerate.
There are a plethora of recognizable locations in our game, though we were limited by the amount of memory in the game consoles. Not only are the landmark buildings cool for players to recognize and to climb all over, jump off, swing around, etc., but they serve a real game play function for navigation. Players can look up and see particular buildings and realize they need to head in that direction.
BIG VIDEO GAME HUNTING: There is a definite "Grand Theft Auto" influence at work here. How do you think the game benefits from this open-ended environment?
DUGAN: The thrilling Spider-Man movement in the first movie was very inspirational. We wanted to bring that thrill to the player, swinging around in a big open environment, and what environment is more open than "all of Manhattan"? It seemed obvious that a big city with streaming technology was the way to go for a superhero that moves this fast.
So aside from supporting the swinging, the streaming, open city lets the player go anywhere in the city, and we tried to make the city varied enough so that exploring it is fun. Especially if you play the trick races we've placed everywhere in the city.
The open-ended city seemed like a natural for Spider-Man -- it's his home; it's the city he's protecting. It seems like it ought to be something he can race around at his speed without going through a sequence of levels that you load one by one.
BIG VIDEO GAME HUNTING: Not to get all Beastie Boys on you, but when is Spider-Man gonna go "To the 5 Boroughs"? It seems he spends all his time in the game in Manhattan. In the next game, will we ever see him in Brooklyn or swinging over Yankee Stadium? And what about a trip to the other boroughs -- after all, he is from Queens.
DUGAN: Well, in the Ultimate Spider-Man comic book, Peter recently said he has a "stay out of Brooklyn for all the obvious reasons" rule. A lot of the plan depends on the "Spider-Man 3" movie. Stay tuned.
BIG VIDEO GAME HUNTING: Really, no other superhero has made as big a splash in the video-game format. Why do you think Spider-Man has translated so successfully?
DUGAN: I think Spider-Man is intrinsically an incredibly cool superhero. It's a joy for Spider-Man to move, for one thing. From the video game perspective, his webs let us design a combat system that's super interesting. It's not just punching or kicking. Instead, the player can lasso a bad guy and yank him up in the air or yank him toward Spider-Man for a punch, or yank him up in the air and tie him to a lamppost, where he hangs like a piñata. Or do the "rodeo" move. Or tie up the bad guy so he can't move or shoot a quick burst of web fluid into his eyes to blind him for a while.
There are so many possibilities with the webs, and we came up with a lot of ways to use them in the game.
