Spider-Man Game Ads

By | Friday, October 08, 2021 2 comments
As a comic-reading, video-game-playing kid in the early 1980s, the prospect of a Spider-Man game that I could play in my very own living room was beyond exciting. Even though I wasn't a huge Spider-Man fan, he was a superhero and he had his own cartoon show that I watched every Saturday morning. So when the ads about this new game started appearing, I was eager (to put it mildly) to get a copy.

Here's what a 10-year-old Sean responded to back then...
And this sequence...
And then there was this TV spot...
The game ultimately turned out to be one of the dullest, most repetitive video games ever. Seriously, the only appreciable difference between levels was that they changed the color of the building! Given how bland the actual game was, the ad agencies who worked on these must have REALLY had their work cut out for them!
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2 comments:

Matt K said...

iirc, there was no Green Goblin active in the comics in 1982, nor any attempt to revive him. I suppose Gobby was in the cartoon(?), but that just makes it all the more fascinating that Marvel made no attempt at aligning the comics with prominent features of contemporary Spider-Man adaptations in other media. These days that kind of thing seems pretty much automatic.

Oooh, I wasn't following Spider-Man back then so it never occurred to me that there wasn't a Green Goblin in the comics at that time! I did some checking and it doesn't look like there had been an active Green Goblin for about four years at that point. I wonder then if they chose Goblin for the game because he was one of the few recognizable Spidey villains that could fly, and thus would be easier to animate.