'Our Spider-Man Games Have Sucked for the Last Five Years,' Admits Activision CEO

Not one to mince words, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick has admitted his belief that the gaming juggernaut isn't doing your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man justice.

"Our Spider-Man games have sucked for the last five years," states Kotick in the February 2010 issue of print magazine Game Informer.

"They are bad games. They were poorly rated because they were bad games. We went away from what is Spider-Man. It's about web-slinging. If you don't do web-slinging right, what is the fantasy of Spider-Man?"

Spider-Man: Friend or Foe (2007) and Web of Shadows (2008)

Among Activision's Spider-Man games across the last five years: Spider-Man 2, Ultimate Spider-Man, Spider-Man & Friends, Spider-Man Print Studio, Spider-Man: Battle for New York, Spider-Man 3, Spider-Man: Friend or Foe, Spider-Man: Web of Shadows.

The admission came about as Kotick was discussing whether or not kids and movie games suffer from a critical bias, explaining that he had "one of those wake-up calls" a few years back, after Blizzard executives asked why Activision was hoping an unspecified "kids game" would get an aggregate Metacritic review score of 80.

"The producers said, 'Well, it's a kid's game, you don't get the best ratings on a kid's game because reviews aren't going to review them as favorably, so if you look at them objectively an 80 is actually a good rating for a kid's game or movie game,'" explained Kotick.

"I remember walking out of the meeting saying, 'Why would we make an 80-rated game?' Even adjusting for genre," he continued. "I was thinking that when we did the great Spider-Man PlayStation game, we got a 95 rating. You can make a great game."

Meanwhile, Activision has yet to announce its next Spider-Man game--the latest being 2008's Spider-Man: Web of Shadows--though the same rumor that accurately claimed High Moon was working on a new Transformers game (now known to be Transformers: War for Cybertron) also indicated that Radical, responsible for the 79-rated super-powered action game Prototype, is crafting a new Spider-Man.