Unreleased Spider-Man 4 Game Unearthed For Nintendo Wii

It's relatively common knowledge that the Sam Raimi trilogy of Spider-Man films almost had a fourth installment that was scuttled in favor of the Andrew Garfield reboot. But now a related piece of history has been unearthed--an unreleased Spider-Man tie-in game for Nintendo Wii.

The YouTube channel Hard4Games showed off footage of the game, which was found on a Wii developer console. It was left in an unfinished state, apparently left behind when the movie plans were canceled. That means a lot of what we can see in it is very rough, but it drops some hints as to what the game would have been.

For one, it drops a relatively big plot hint with a newspaper clipping that references the Vulture. Rumors suggested that Raimi's Spider-Man 4 might have included Vulture, though other rumors suggested villains like Lizard would take the lead. The developers had also started creating some generic enemies like a street thug and a larger enemy with a face mask and chemical tubing.

The majority of the video shows off different environments, most of which are testing grounds rather than full-fledged gameplay areas. A street scene shows off lighting effects, and environment areas show off Manhattan landmarks like Little Italy and the Chrysler Building. One physics playground has grapple points for webswinging, and the floor tiles are marked with measurements. There's also some rudimentary combat shown.

This build probably would have been put together sometime between 2007, when Spider-Man 3 was released, and 2010, when news broke that Spider-Man 4 had been officially shelved. That time period wasn't entirely bereft of Spidey games, though, since Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions released in 2010. The Andrew Garfield reboot would get its own movie tie-in game two years later.