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

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

The TV Room

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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Spider-Man: Friend or Foe - Questions & Answers

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