Treyarch’s Jonathan Zamkoff conducts a tour of Ultimate Spider-Man
By Michael Lafferty

“…everything we did was to make a comic book come to life in a 3D environment”

A young man makes a terrible mistake and now battles with himself to gain control of the evil he has unleashed. The problem is that he is the evil. Contrast that to a young man who is struggling with incredible power, has control over it and yet, on some levels, does not want the power. 

Ultimate Spider-Man (Treyarch and Activision – a release on the GameCube, PlayStation 2, and Xbox, in late September) is one of those games that breaks new ground graphically, offers disparate gaming styles but ties it all together with a compelling story by Brian Michael Bendis (author of the Ultimate Spider-Man comic book series at Marvel) and an easy-to-use control system.  

During a recent trip to San Francisco, for an event hosted by Activision, Treyarch’s senior producer Jonathan Zamkoff sat down to talk about Ultimate Spider-Man. 

He began the interview by recounting an incident that happened when they were showing off an original demo to Brian Michael Bendis (the man who penned the stories for the Ultimate Spider-Man series at Marvel and who wrote the story for this game).

“He literally stopped the demo to call Mark Bagley (who did the pencils for the Ultimate Spider-Man series), started laughing and said ‘you have no idea what they have done down at Treyarch. Of all the compliments we get, from the press, hearing Bagley and Bendis trip over themselves over the game was such an honor. This is their baby; all we’ve done is make it a 3D medium.”

Question: When you were putting this together, what inspired you to create this look for the game?

Jonathan: “The truth of the matter is our art director is a comic geek. He was drawing comic books at 6 years old; it is what he always wanted to do. We have very, very die-hard comic book fans on the high end of our development team, and they didn’t want to do a Spider-Man game, especially an Ultimate Spider-Man game if they didn’t do Ultimate Spider-Man. I mean we spent the first two months of the development cutting up the comic book and putting it everywhere in the office, looking at the look, seeing how we could get the rendering technique down, the shader down. It took close to four months to get the character shader in a state where we were comfortable with it.  

“Obviously, if you were to take a copy of Ultimate Spider-Man and put it up next to the screen, all we were really trying to do is faithfully represent what the comic book was doing.”

Q: You mentioned cutting up the frames from the comic books – is that what led to the motion graphics panels?

Jonathan: “The motion graphics panels were an early discussion we were having. Obviously, animation and cinematics are very important to video games but, again, we were making a 3D interactive comic. What were the things that define a video game that is emulating a comic? Obviously the look of the characters and as Brian Michael Bendis has touched on – the writing is important, but take it to the next level. Why not do your cinematics to give the look of the comic book? This idea didn’t happen overnight. We did a bunch of iterations, we tested a lot of stuff, we had to write a tool to do the technology because a lot of the cinematics were done in-game in the engine, so it took a long time. But everything we did was to make a comic book come to life in a 3D environment.”

Q: What was the impetus to put Venom into the game?

Jonathan: “He is the ultimate. He is the epitome of the anti-hero. We have done Goblin in the past, and Doc Ock in Spider-Man 2; Venom has received a treatment since the Neversoft game way back when on the PS1. And so Venom was due.” 

Q: Did you feel that this game’s particular graphics style really suited him?

Jonathan: “I think the graphics style did. Again, we were trying to be very faithful to the comics series and the Venom art in the comics series is awesome. Bendis was telling us that sales went through the roof when Venom appeared. He just has a natural feel and if you are going to do a bad character – a bad, playable character – Venom is perfect.

The other nice thing for us, as you saw when you played, there is obviously a major different feel between playing Spider-Man and playing Venom. You don’t have to re-learn the control stuff. … We wanted to make it a very different experience on the surface but we didn’t want it to feel like you were learning two video games to play both characters.”

Q: The whole Venom aspect is very dark. Are you at all concerned that gamers might not respond to that element when it is juxtaposed against the more “gentleman-ly” Spider-Man?

Jonathan: “It’s a great perception you have that that is a possibility. In some ways I find the dichotomy accentuates the good of both characters. Being bad as Venom, when you play as Spider-Man you feel like you must go out and save the world because around the corner you know that darkness is looming. And there are those players who like to be bad. There are those players who like to be naughty. You feel like all the good you do as Spider-Man, you can unravel it as Venom. Venom is a complicated character. He is not just this wicked person who is out to do bad.…

“You have Eddie Brock, who is just a normal human being, he is a young kid, in college. He consumed this thing that is much more powerful than he could ever imagine and control is the big issue for Eddie Brock. The suit wrestles with Eddie’s mind to take control and, obviously, Eddie wants to control the suit. He has gotten a taste of the power and he does – to some degree – like the dark side of things but wants to control it. 

“It’s really the struggle for power and the responsibility that comes with it, and there is a dark side of power and how you deal with those kind of situations.” 

Q: You’ve done a really good job of capturing the essence of Wolverine during his appearance in the game. With such a wealth of Marvel characters to choose from, how did you go about deciding who you would integrate into the storyline?

Jonathan: “First of all, working with Brian Michael Bendis, the guy is a trove of ideas. The one thing we never ran out of in talking with Bendis was potential story lines, threads, plots. And then Spider-Man has a huge cast of characters. I will say there are characters that wound up in that game that haven’t been written into Ultimate Spider-Man yet, but Bendis is such a cool guy that he worked with us to get those in the game. They will probably wind up with in the comic book.  

“Marvel was a dream to work with on this project. They really understood the need for a huge cast of characters. There is nothing better than making a Spider-Man comic book video game than to have a broad array of characters, be it cameos, be it playables, it really is a vibrant world – the Marvel world – and we really wanted to integrate as much of it as we possibly could. We sat with Bendis and we wrote stories and we came up with dialogue and we came up with story threads and we had more characters than originally designed and we had to cut levels because as time permits, you do what you can. But when you see Wolverine early on in the game, you can only imagine how many characters you are going to be seeing. As a matter of fact, it is the largest line-up of Marvel villains and heroes than in any Spider-Man game to date. We pulled out all the stops and wanted to give you a taste of everything.

“You have Bendis writing the dialogue, why not give the characters that people want to see and blow them away with it? The game is heavy, heavy, heavy story driven. We do have the open city, we do have the big world and the emergent behavior, but it is a comic book, it is Bendis’ work and we really wanted to give a rich experience with the story side.”

Q: The thing that was most surprising was the control scheme was very intuitive. You obviously made sure that this game was immediately playable by anybody.

Jonathan: “This is not happenstance, you are absolutely right. We spent many, many months … we wanted to make all the controls accessible in this game. We wanted to avoid what a lot of games do … we didn’t want you to have to hold down three buttons and pull a trigger just to perform a simple move. We worked with the Spider-Man 2 team, we are all Treyarch, so we springboarded off what they had done. Spider-Man 2, in my mind, is an amazing game. It really opened up the door for all Spider-Man games, with the physical swing system and the open city, and we started with that. We had an engine that worked and that was a huge leap for us, to start with something that worked. And all we really wanted to do was to take that system and make it more accessible. Make it so that someone could walk into an EB, and Ultimate Spider-Man is at the kiosk, that they could pick up the controller and be playing in 30 seconds as opposed to fumbling around and looking for a tutorial. With so much game to offer, we don’t want the simple things – like the control scheme – to hold people back.”

Q: Do you consider playing Venom a guilty pleasure?

With that Jonathan smiled broadly: “Absolutely. I love it!”

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