Gravel Talks about Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions

In an interview with Comic Book Resources, Beenox's Stephane Gravel talked in depth with the site about why some past Spidey games have failed, why some have succeeded, and what she thinks this games chances are.

Throughout the article you get a real sense that this game has the makings of a mega-hit. The spared no expense in getting Marvel creative talent such as Dan Slott to create the story and hired some great voice talent such as Neil Patrick Harris, Josh Keaton, Christopher Daniel Barnes, and Dan Gilvezan.


Where do you think Spider-Man games have struggled in the past, and what did you find most challenging about designing a game (or four) around Spider-Man?

Making a game with Spidey isn’t an easy task—he’s super-strong, he can crawl on walls and he has web that he uses in combat or to navigate. So your basic videogame rules when trying to confine the character somewhere are gone! So what you need to do, in our opinion, is make sure that everything “feels” like it’s true to the Spider-Man mythos. Every decision we made for the game had to answer that simple question: “does it make sense to the Marvel Spider-Man universe?” If the answer was ‘no’ then that feature or level or enemy had to be changed to make sure it makes sense in the universe.

One of the main challenges was to decide which abilities would be unique to which character. We really like these abilities and having to decide which Spider-Man can do what wasn’t an easy decision. Also, at some point, you must remember that Spider-Man is a true hero and there are some things he would never do, period. So we had to think of solutions for such occurrences, like when enemies were thrown off a high ledge, for example. In these cases, we made it absolutely clear that no enemy is ever killed – only defeated.

Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions” will be released on September 7, 2010 for the DS, PS3, Wii, and Xbox 360