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Inside Next Level Games - Making Spider-Man: FoF (pg. 2)

Oct 23, 2007

The Vancouver-based team at Next Level Games (NLG) has been churning out awesome games for years - from their award-winning Super Mario Strikers to the wicked Mario Strikers Charged and their last title - Spider-Man: Friend or Foe! To celebrate their comic-book adventure, Gary went knocking on their front door and had a chance to pop in and chat with them about what it was like making a superhero video game. Here's the 411 on making video games at Next Level Games!

Next Level Games - Programming, Production and Prototypes

Building Spider-Man: Friend or Foe started in March 2006 and took about a year and a half. Here's how it went down.
  • Mar. '06 - Activision calls, NLG creates a game outline and puts 10-15 people to work.
  • Mar. '06 - Sept. '06 - A clunky prototype is ready to play!
  • Sept. '06 - Jan. '07 - Pre-production as 35 programmers and game designers build the game world.
  • Jan. '07 - Aug. '07 - Production time! 45 game designers, artists, programmers and more go to work on making cool moves, attack combos, awesome graphics and boss battles.
  • Aug. '07 - NLG battles the greatest supervillain of all - game bugs!
  • Sept. '07 - The finished Spider-Man game gets polished and sent to game stores.
  • Welcome to Next Level Games

    Gary goes inside Next Level Games to chat with the creators of the Spider-Man: Friend or Foe video game.
    The TV Room
    Gary goes inside Next Level Games to chat with the creators of the Spider-Man: Friend or Foe video game.
    Bike Parking and Red Bull

    Next Level Games - Spidey vs. Red Bull and Other Fun Facts

  • Most of the NLG team are comic book fans and working on a Spider-Man video game was a dream job for them!
  • All the office names at NLG have wacky names like Hufflegruff and Chatterbox.
  • NLG is located right above the Red Bull power-drink company. The team not only has a Red Bull cooler in their office, the butt-kicking gamer fuel company sponsored a few office parties. Woo-hoo!
  • Lots of the NLG team have kids of their own and really loved making a game that they could play with their family.
  • When the Spider-Man 3 movie came out, the entire Next Level Games team went out to see it.
  • There's a team at NLG that organizes office parties to keep things fun.
  • It's office policy at NLG to go home at 5pm because working until 3am is no fun!
  • Click Here for the first half of the info on Next Level Games, including how they designed Spider-Man: Friend or Foe!
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