This Week in Retro: Captain America, the Avengers, and Spider-Man [1991] (Patreon)

January 1991: Marvel Fans Welcome Two New Superhero Beat-Em-Ups to their Universe

by Diamond Feit

Welcome to 2021, true believers! Let's turn the clock back 30 years to 1991 and a simpler time, when 16-bit game consoles were the new hotness yet 8-bit consoles remained the most widely owned—and the only place to play the newest, most advanced games was in your local arcade. And yes, you probably had a "local" arcade, be it a dedicated room full of the latest cabinets or the odd one or two machines sitting in a deli or a pizzeria near your school.

While we are mere months away—weeks, even—from the release of an epic arcade game that will change the entire history of the medium going forward, in the here-and-now of January 1991, the coolest video games are "beat-’em-ups." These games allow between one and four players to work together as they fight their way through screen after screen of punchable bad guys. Double Dragon, the granddaddy of the genre is still kicking, but the third game in that series turned out to be a bit of a letdown when bolder games like Final Fight or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are an option. Indeed, that last one is particularly important: Why struggle to create an original team of heroes and villains for your beat-’em-up when licensing an established property will draw more eyeballs (and coins) to your game?

It is in this context that two distinct beat-’em-ups, produced by two distinct companies, arrive sometime in January of 1991, both based on the world of Marvel Comics. As previously established in this column, I was a huge Marvel fan growing up, so both of these arcade games were automatic attention (and coin) magnets for me. But considering how similar they may appear on paper, 30 years later they work out to be two very different games with very different legacies.

Let us begin with the game with the broadest appeal: Captain America and the Avengers, manufactured by Data East, a company that we can safely describe in hindsight as "B-tier." Data East made a lot of games, some of them being quite memorable, but a lot of them were merely… fine. Data East had dabbled in beat-’em-ups, but typically those took the form of side-view platformers, like Bad Dudes vs. Dragon Ninja. In Captain America and the Avengers, up to four players could team up together, so single-plane movement would not do. Instead, Data East went with a forward-tilted perspective that allowed players to freely move into the foreground and background. This mechanic came at the cost of visual flair; character sprites in Captain America and the Avengers are a lot smaller than those seen in other beat-’em-ups of the era.

Captain America and the Avengers stars Captain America and three Avengers: Iron Man, Vision, and *rolls dice* Hawkeye? Every character can punch foes from up close, but they can also pick up enemies (along with random objects like benches and soda cans) to throw as projectiles. Every character also has their own unique long-range attack: Cap can throw his shield, Iron Man and Vision have energy beams, and Hawkeye has… oh, what is his thing? Arrows! Yes, arrows. Hawkeye has a bow and many, many arrows.

The game does not restrict long-range attacks with ammunition or a health penalty, so patient players are free to stand back and fire away as much as they like. In fact, there are entire levels where the heroes take to the sky and the game turns into a scrolling shooter (please do not ask how many shields Captain America is carrying during these stages; it’s a large number. The man is a Super Soldier and doesn't have to worry about "encumbrance" like the rest of us!).

The main appeal of Captain America and the Avengers, as is often the case with comic book properties, is the sheer number of villains present in the game. The players’ ultimate goal is to defeat the Red Skull (a character done very dirty in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, if I may say so). Along the way, each boss the players fight is a marquee name from the comics—well, each boss aside from the giant robot octopus in the underwater stage. Likewise, super-allies make cameo appearances during the game, the funniest of which is famed speedster Quicksilver, who runs on screen to deliver a health item before running away. Surely he has more uses than that!

The icing on this cake? The sound effects. Captain America and the Avengers has a lot of barrel-chested voice samples, all of which are boombastic and perfectly in tune with the game's comic book aesthetics (which is also reflected in the on-screen onomatopoeia effect, like "THWAK" and "BOOM"). The best/worst one is the sound a hero makes once their health runs out: Regardless of which hero you choose, they stumble to the ground and shout "I CAN'T MOVE!"* which is the player's cue to put it another coin to continue.

Captain America and the Avengers was ported to Sega Genesis and Super NES, though there were also more primitive versions made for Game Gear and Game Boy. Data East published an NES release, which shares a name with the arcade game but looks and plays completely differently. None of these ports allowed for a full squad of four players at the same time, however, so the experience was never going to fully translate to the living room. I know I never even bothered with the home editions, remaining content to simply pump in a couple bucks and play through the entire game whenever I saw the machine in the wild. I have one memory of doing exactly this on a family trip to Niagara Falls—the U.S. side, naturally, because Captain America is no Canuck.

On the other hand, there is Spider-Man: The Videogame (one word!), made by Sega. Despite being a concurrent release with Captain America and the Avengers, Sega's take on the beat-em-up feels cutting edge—and also weird as hell. For starters, look at the lineup: Spidey's the star, but you need four players to compete in the brawler market of 1991, so he's joined here by known associate Black Cat, relative stranger Sub-Mariner, and… Hawkeye. Yes, really. Hawkeye starred in two video games in one single month in 1991.

Running on Sega's System 32 arcade board, Spider-Man: The Videogame is colorful and bold, with big sprites for every character. While Captain America and the Avengers offered players lots of space and time to choose their moves wisely, Spider-Man and his curious collection of friends are often overwhelmed, with enemies crowding the screen. There's also no time to lose, as the player's Life gauge is constantly, slowly ticking away; I don't know what evil is plaguing the heroes in canon, but even when they stand perfectly still, they are dying. A meta-commentary on the human condition, or a petty scheme to get players to pony up more quarters?

Speaking of "big sprites," Spider-Man: The Videogame also mixes up the beat-’em-up formula with platforming stages between the fighting stages. These do not appear with off-screen transitions; instead, the action pauses and the "camera" zooms in or out—a shocking effect in 1991, and one that still looks groovy 30 years later. In platforming mode, everyone's a wall-crawler as players must scale buildings and catwalks while taking fire from enemy weapons, though the game is thankfully generous with the health pickups during these stages.

Spider-Man has one of the stronger rogue's galleries of the Marvel universe, and he faces off against most of his biggest foes in Spider-Man: The Videogame. The game leans hard on the hottest villain at the time, Venom, who ends up transforming from a regular enemy to a giant enemy and must be fought in multiple game modes throughout the first chapter. Any kid who puts a quarter into Spider-Man: The Videogame should last long enough to face Venom at least once, so the development team surely knew what their audience wanted.

Spider-Man: The Videogame looks great, plays well, and offers a lot of variety to players, but there is one aspect of the game that deserves extra attention: The sound. Not the music, which is weird, but the sound, which is extremely weird. All the speech samples in the game are heavily distorted. Venom gets a lot of lines, but I couldn't tell you a single word he says. The most common enemies in the game appear to be masked thugs from the Hellfire Club (who are typically X-Men villains, but whatever). When they appear, or attack, or do anything, they hoot and holler in a wholly unnatural way. Likewise, the Green Goblin makes several appearances throughout the game, and while I'm certain the developers wanted to make him "cackle" what we get instead is a lot of quacking. Seriously, watch a YouTube playthrough and tell me he doesn't sound like Donald Duck when he gets his ass kicked.

Marvel fans got a lot of Spider-Man video games in the 1990s, but this definitive article was only ever released in arcades. Worse, the recent release of a very popular PS4 game simply called Spider-Man makes this 1991 title a lot harder to google. It’s an unfortunate downside to the licensing question from before: When you make a video game starring a character you don't own, your time with your own work becomes limited.

Perhaps some day, when Disney buys Data East or Sega and licensing becomes a non-issue, we might see Captain America and the Avengers or Spider-Man: The Videogame turn up on a modern system in a retro bundle. I'd like that, if only so more human beings would understand the exact cadence of random noises that are echoing inside my brain 30 years later. Thank you, Quicksilver!

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan and is an active Twitter user.

*Listening to the raw voice samples 30 years later, it is apparent they are saying "I CAN'T LOSE" but my brain made up its mind in 1991.