Spawn on the Super Nintendo is a weird licensed game with a LOT of surprisingly graphic body horror elements going on
I’m almost certain the SNES title is the first Spawn video game ever released. It came out before the live-action movie and before the HBO animated series, for sure, so pretty much the only kind of Spawn media it could pull from were the comics. And maybe the toy line, although I’m not sure just how much lore you could borrow from there.
Officially titled Todd McFarlane’s Spawn: The Video Game, the Acclaim release is pretty much a testament to the controversial comic book creator’s ego. Pretty much all of the cutscenes are lifted straight from the pages of the comic and the developers didn’t even try to alter McFarlane’s style for the character sprites. Which poses some problems here and there — sorry, but 1995 video game technology just wasn’t capable of rendering some of his trademark, exaggerated, ultra-angular designs in real time yet.
I suppose it’s a faithful enough tie-in, though. I have only vague recollections of the comic series but I recall it being very violent and bloody, especially compared to the Marvel and DC comics of the era. Unsurprisingly, this game isn’t glutted with wall to wall Mortal Kombat gore, but it DOES get away with a lot more stuff than you might expect for a T-rated SNES game. It may not be a total bloodbath, but it does have a lot of unsavory and gross imagery in it, to the point that it might be the closest thing the Super Nintendo has to a Splatterhouse analogue.
Of course, there’s a WORLD of difference between Spawn and the beloved Namco franchise. The Splatterhouse games, of course, are actually really, really good and this game is … not. I’m hesitant to call it a truly bad game, even though some aspects of the experience are absolutely terrible. It’s really an average game at best, with some things working for it and a lot of things working against it. But it makes sense to start with the good, because if I didn’t, what’s the point of even profiling it in the first place?
For a 1995 SNES game the graphics are OK. They clearly aren’t state of the art or anything like that, but the animations are very crisp and fluid, to the point you could argue they’re the best technical aspects of the entire game. Along those same lines, you get a pretty robust number of attacks in the game, which is a pleasant surprise. It’s not just a “you get a punch, kick and jumping attack” type of experience, you get about 20 or so different ways of dispatching adversaries, with a “combat” system that almost feels more like a fighting game than it does a dime-a-dozen action sidescroller. And on top of that you get a couple of special attacks, plus a few “spells” to memorize. It’s a rare platforming game on the SNES that uses almost every button on the control pad, and in a way that doesn’t seem superfluous and overkill. It’s not just another brainless beat-em-up and for that, it should be admired and appreciated. You know, a little.
The other thing that makes Spawn noteworthy — and, frankly, the only reason I’m writing about it for this site — is just how much body horror it manages to wedge into the cartridge. There’s no genteel way to put, there is some GROSS stuff going on in this game, from backgrounds that look like something out of a David Cronenberg sex dream to humongous enemies that call to mind the best work of Screaming Mad George’s career. We all know how censorship Nintendo was back in the day (as evident by their bloodless version of Mortal Kombat) so I was genuinely surprised to see AS much Clive Barker-ish imagery in this tittle. And let’s be real, sometimes, aesthetics alone are enough to carry an old school video game.
Alas, for all the good things I could say about Spawn, I can list off just as many negatives. It’s a game that’s plagued by bad game design choices, which are a shame, because with a bit more polish and refinement this probably could’ve been one of the better superhero tie-in games on the console. The jumping mechanics are pretty sticky and that’s a MAJOR headache, since the game loves to toss migraine-inducing platforming sequences at you all the time. You have to wall jump every now and then and there was at least one section that I’m still convinced is impossible to pull off — the only way I even managed it was through what was certainly a rare fortuitous glitch on my part. If not for that fluke, I probably wouldn’t have beaten the game, or even bothered continuing to play it.
The hit detection system (i.e., how and when the game registers your character coming into contact with enemies and other obstacles) is also inconsistent. Sometimes you’ll effortlessly clip through bad guys like in Backrooms and other times they’ll be able to render damage even though they’re almost half a screen away from you. The boss fights are also insanely, obscenely long, to the point a few take upwards of four or five minutes of constant button mashing. There’s “hard because it requires skill and dexterity,” then there’s “hard because the programmers didn’t know what else to do to make the game feel longer.” Like I even have to tell you where Spawn rests on that particular spectrum.
Spawn is an imperfect game but it has a certain style and charm to it that at least makes it feel different from so many other games on the Super Nintendo at the time. When it’s irritating it’s downright maddening, but when it hits its groove … well, it’s still only mildly above mediocre, truthfully. But it’s got moxie and spunk, for sure. And it’s far from the worst Spawn game ever made — I mean, did you ever see that crap on the PS1?
