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Retro (TimeExtension) the hellish experience of making licensed video games in the 90s (re. Spider-man and the X-men on SNES).

PixelKnight

Observing the process
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This is about the production of Spider-Man and the X-men on SNES, being made in 1992. Still can’t believe games like this were made by three people. That fax is savage!

Used a slightly different thread title to the article title to make it clear it’s not about the modern Spidey games.

Kevin Edwards, who worked on the title, has been sharing some memories of its development, which took place 30 years ago. A team of just three people made the game and Edwards has shared a fax from Acclaim (publisher of Arcade's Revenge via its LJN label) which illustrates the kind of intense pressure developers faced at this moment in time
Our personal favourite comment from the fax – which, as we'll sure you've noticed, features a lot of capital letters – is: "NINTENDO HAS INFORMED US THAT WE CAN'T USE THE TERM 'MURDERWORLD' PLEASE REMOVE IT."
 
Insightful.
Those comments come across as incredibly blunt and singling out Mike to the team is..... Well, I wouldn't do it that way.
 
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Oh man, if Murderworld is out, I'm guessing slaughterhousebnb is probably not gonna fly, either
 
Used to own that game on the Super NES and I never got far in some of the stages. The soundtrack by Geoff and Tim Follin was stellar though.

Always interesting to read about these backstories.
 
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I really disliked these kind of ‘where do I go, what do I do’ games, especially ones like this that change up the rules on each stage. It’s not like Metroidvanias where the world expands with your abilities, it was more just like each section was a mediocre platformer/action game of its own. To be fair, this level of pressure and staff explains a lot, given that absolutely everything got a licensed game back then. Kids IP, horror film, thriller, crime caper, cartoon, comic, toy line? ‘Churn out a sidescroller for it, they are just kids, they won’t notice!’. Some of us did notice though, which is why the good ones still resonate with word of mouth :D
 
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i actually have a copy of this game lying around, surprisingly.

needless to say, extremely rushed production schedules were unfortunately rather common for licensed games, even going back into the atari era with the infamous ET game (5 and ½ whole weeks of development.)
there were some exceptions, and those generally turned out well. Goldeneye notably came out over two years after the film, for example.
 
Time is definitely not on the side of developers especially games with unmovable release dates for some reason (like movie release date).
 
Someone at that company really needed some soft skills and people management skills trainings, fucking assholes, no wonder with leadership like that the game was not that good and eventually the company died.
 
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i actually have a copy of this game lying around, surprisingly.

needless to say, extremely rushed production schedules were unfortunately rather common for licensed games, even going back into the atari era with the infamous ET game (5 and ½ whole weeks of development.)
there were some exceptions, and those generally turned out well. Goldeneye notably came out over two years after the film, for example.
Goldeneye is a really good example. Maybe I should make a thread on good licensed games 🤔

Edit- made that thread-
 
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That’s about what I expected it to be like to work for Acclaim back in the day.

It’s a miracle that the Turok games came out of them as good as they did!
 
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