Review Fix chats with “The Web of Spider-Man Games: The Amazing and the (Not So) Spectacular†author Blair Farrell to find out what inspired his book and more.
Review Fix: What was the inspiration for this book?
Blair Farrell: I grew up with video game magazines and at the end of my university degree, I became infatuated with The 1UP Show, an online web series starring the staff of Electronic Gaming Monthly, my favorite video game magazine. I never thought myself a writer, but I suddenly wanted to do nothing more in my life than write about video games, just like people like Dan Hsu, Jeremy Parish, Garnett Lee, Shane Bettenhausen and countless others. Over the years I wrote on blogs on now defunct websites, even tried starting one of my own, but a unique hook that would make me stand out. That is, until early 2012, when I started my website, Comic Gamers Assemble.
A combination of the “New 52” relaunch initiative, the hype surrounding Marvel’s The Avengers and the late 2011 release of Batman: Arkham City caused me to become infatuated with comic books. Comics had been a part of my life in one way or another: the books themselves, animated shows, movies, and of course, video games, but suddenly I found what I want to focus on. I dove into researching comic book video games during my downtime at the job I was holding at the time, and then turned to assembling a massive collection of video games inspired by comics.
I did a lot of pieces for my site in 2017, all of which I was very proud of, but I also burnt myself out as I felt I wasn’t doing enough so I wrote a very difficult post about how I was taking time off. My friend, Chris Baker, commented on the post and said I should use some of my pieces and make a book. I thought about it for a month or so, and then I made the decision to write what would eventually become The Web of Spider-Man Games: The Amazing and the (Not So) Spectacular. It was an easy choice as to how I would focus myself as Spider-Man has been a part of my life since I was four or five years old and is easily my favorite fictional character of all time.
Review Fix: What was the research process like?
Farrell: For a book like this, research involved playing Spider-Man video games whenever I could get a spare moment. My Game Boy Advance or DS came with me when I went to work so I could sneak in some play time whenever I could. Playing video games sounds like one of the easiest part of the process, but it can be very taxing. There are a lot of great Spider-Man games, but there’s also a lot of bad ones too, hence the sub-title of my book. Sometimes I really wanted to be doing anything other than playing something like Spider-Man 2 for the original Game Boy or Spider-Man: Friend or Foe for the Nintendo DS. The skeleton of many of the chapters came from pieces I had already written for my site, so that helped cut down on writing original pieces, but the challenge with those came from polishing pieces I sometimes had written years ago and then editing to fit them into the context of a book.
Something I tried to do for as many chapters as I could was find classic print ads that appeared in magazines or comics and review scores from classic magazines. This was done to show what people were saying about these games when they were new in juxtaposition to what I was writing about them now. This led me to going through my small magazine collection and then trying to find whatever was archived online. For this I had a lot of help from my, pun intended, amazing friends, Chris Baker, Joshua Sutton who runs the YouTube channel Panels to PIxels and Chris Clow, the creator of the podcast Comics on Consoles who helped point me in the write direction when I couldn’t find something. Co-host of the Player One Podcast, Greg Sewart, also gifted me an incredible EGM review archive so I didn’t have to waste time going through every issue. All I had to do was look for what game I wanted, then check out the issue number.
Review Fix: What did you learn about yourself through the writing process?
Farrell: Perhaps one of the biggest takeaways I learned is that even though my name is on the cover, it wouldn’t have come together without the help of so many. My advice to anyone who wishes to write is to build a positive support network because there will be times when you’ll be flying high, but those are also met with days that you feel like you’re a fraud. There were times throughout the process where I didn’t think I could make it to the finish line, and when I thought I was initially done, I had a trusted friend give me some hard truth that it wasn’t ready. It has hard to hear at the time, but I’m forever grateful that they did. I’ve learned that you need to be able to take criticism without taking things too personally. You’re never going to get everything right on the first try, and you can spend just as much time editing as writing. For my future projects, I hope to also collaborate with an editor as this book was largely self-edited. You can go through something a million times and still find mistakes, so find someone who you can trust to give the right feedback.
Review Fix: Any tough moments?
Farrell: My initial plan was to try and have my book out before Marvel’s Spider-Man launched last year. My book would’ve served as a nice closure to one part of Spider-Man’s video game legacy as he moved on to another. When I showed some sample chapters to get some feedback, I essentially felt like Norman Osborn in the first Spider-Man film when I was told to go back to formula. I was so excited to show off what I had done, but I was wisely told that releasing at that time would’ve done more harm than good. It was tough, and I don’t think I looked at my work for a good few weeks after that but I eventually got back to work.
I unfortunately launched at a pretty hard time and I didn’t get a chance to take it all in that I had accomplished the feat of putting out my first ever book. I left my job of many years in February to start a new one but due to some complicated problems, I was let go and found myself out of work. Suddenly there was more pressure on my book to be something more than what it could ever hope to be. I spent many days checking sales reports and kept asking myself if it was all worth the effort.
Review Fix: Who will enjoy this book the most?
Farrell: There’s a whole new audience who are discovering Marvel video games now thanks to recent titles like the PlayStation 4 exclusive Marvel’s Spider-Man, which is now the best selling superhero video game of all time, and Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order for the Nintendo Switch. There are a lot of people whose first Spider-Man game will be Marvel’s Spider-Man and my book will show how Spider-Man video games evolved into that title. My book starts at the Game Boy and goes all the way to last year’s big Spider-Man game, and for those who have nostalgia for games like Maximum Carnage for the SNES/Genesis or Neversoft’s Spider-Man on consoles like the original PlayStation, it will be a way to relive memories of playing games like those. Licensed games tend to get forgotten over the years as many are subjected to unfortunate licensing situations that prevents them from ever getting rereleased. I hope that my book can help those who wish to preserve the legacy of these games that get left to the wayside due to a stigma that people sometimes have with licensed games.
Review Fix: Worst Spidey game ever?
Farrell: Probably the second and third Spider-Man games for the Game Boy. They’re largely unplayable and such a disappointment coming off of Spider-Man’s Game Boy debut, The Amazing Spider-Man, which was developed by Rare. The Amazing Spider-Man holds a special place in my heart because it was the first superhero game I ever owned and I’ve become intimately familiar with it over the years. I remember seeing Spider-Man 2 and its follow-up in magazine ads and on store shelves and wanted them so bad growing up. In hindsight I’m glad I didn’t get them and just stuck to playing the first Game Boy game over and over.
Review Fix: Best?
Farrell: The general consensus among many now is Marvel’s Spider-Man, and while I think that game has great mechanics, terrific acting and writing, it’s story could be paced better and there’s a lot of repetition in the side-missions. There’s a trope in Spider-Man comics that he always wins round two, and I think whatever Insomniac does next will iron out that games problems given their track record with sequels. My favorite Spider-Man games tends to change depending on how I feel at the time, but the top two for me are Spider-Man from Neversoft and Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions. I prefer the linear Spider-Man games over the open-world ones as they tend to have far more moments that stand out. Every boss in Spider-Man stands out and while it’s a short game, there’s a lot of stuff to unlock and collect, and it’s just fun to casually throw on every now and again. The soundtrack from Tommy Tallarico is just killer too, and I don’t think a Spider-Man game will ever have a soundtrack that will best it Shattered Dimensions has a lot of what makes that game great, and it plays like an interactive love-letter to the history of Spider-Man with the roster of villains and the actors who play the four Spider-Men, all of which voiced the character in the past.
Review Fix: Most underrated?Â
Farrell: Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions on the Nintendo DS. Few people seem to have played it, and that’s a shame. It’s essentially the Metroid and later Castlevania games formula applied to the Spider-Man license and it works better than you think. For anyone who loves that type of game, you need to check it out. I did a Buried Treasure video for Shattered Dimensions for The Electric Playground YouTube channel.
Review Fix: What’s next for you?Â
Farrell: Right now I’m working on a follow-up, The Avengers Video Game Initiative, which will essentially be the Marvel Cinematic Universe formula but applied to video games. Essentially it will cover all the games starring Iron Man, Hulk, Thor and Captain America before getting into the games about The Avengers and other crossover games like the Marvel Ultimate Alliance and LEGO Marvel Super Heroes games. I self-published my first book, but I’m planning to look for a publisher for my second. I’m still writing news posts and other pieces for my site, Comic Gamers Assemble, and periodically I write pieces for Electric Bento. I’m in the planning stages for another book but I’m not ready to quite talk about it yet.
Review Fix: Anything else you’d like to add? Â
Farrell: People every right to dismiss licensed video games, but there are many that deserve to be discovered. The video game industry tends to move really fast and people tend to move onto whatever’s new. A company like Insomniac Games doesn’t get to a game like Marvel’s Spider-Man without first seeing what did and didn’t work with other Spider-Man games. There’s a lot of great comic book games, many starring Spider-Man, that are in danger of disappearing as they just simply can’t get rereleased. Don’t sit on something like Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions on the Nintendo DS as someday it might be too late.
For anyone who wishes to get into writing, know that’s tough and there will be many days you feel like giving up, but just know that’s not a unique feeling, it’s a part of the process. You’re also not going to be great right out of the game, and it can take many years to really find your voice. I’ve looked back on pieces I’ve written barely three years ago and they don’t compare to some of the stuff I’ve put out now. I’ve met some wonderful friends and created a large body of work that I’m very proud of and though many will say I could probably be doing something better with my life than playing licensed games of questionable quality, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
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