Ultimate Spider-Man is one of the more highly rated Spider-Man video games, but it's not widely known that a sequel, Ultimate Spider-Man 2, was canceled shortly after it began preliminary development. Treyarch did some preliminary concepts for it, but it didn’t get too far. The most developers ended up making was a piece of concept art, some game assets, and story treatment. The team was unsure whether or not the game would get picked up by their publisher, Activision, so they were cautious about putting too much work into something that wouldn’t get off the ground.
Ultimate Spider-Man was released in 2005. The game was well received and applied many of the gameplay features from its predecessor, Spider-Man 2, which tied into the Sam Raimi movie of the same name. Critics praised the comic book art style and the ability to play as both Spider-Man and Venom, though Venom’s mechanics in Ultimate were slightly messed up. The game takes place in the Ultimate Marvel Comics continuity, with the story following Spider-Man’s quest to stop Trask Industries and their experimentation with the Venom symbiote. While the sequel never happened, a prequel was made in 2006 for the Nintendo handheld systems, titled Spider-Man: Battle for New York.
In the end, Activision decided not to move forward with Ultimate Spider-Man 2. YouTuber Matt McMuscles uploaded a video detailing the specifics of the situation, with lead texture artist on Ultimate Spider-Man, Chris Salazar, being interviewed. He explains that Activision decided to put resources elsewhere because it didn’t believe a sequel would sell well. What fueled this decision was the comparison in sales between Ultimate Spider-Man and the movie tie-in for Raimi's Spider-Man 2, which released a year earlier in 2004. Activision allegedly didn't think that Ultimate Spider-Man 2 would get the kind of sales that another movie tie-in game would, and so shut down the project shortly after it began development. This represents one of the most disappointing Spider-Man game cancellations, as Treyarch's original Ultimate title ranks among the wall-crawler's finest.
The video also explains that the highly acclaimed comic book writer and writer of the first Ultimate Spider-Man, as well as the Ultimate Spider-Man comic series, Brian Michael Bendis, was slated to return to write the sequel’s story. According to Matt McMuscles’s video, the game was going to feature the Green Goblin - one of the villains Insomniac’s Spider-Men haven’t yet fought - as the main villain, and possibly even the second playable character, replacing Venom’s role from the first game. Green Goblin may seem like an odd choice, given his lack of anti-hero credentials, but Venom was also pretty monstrous in the first Marvel's Spider-Man, so it makes sense as to why that trope was to be repeated in the canceled sequel.
Matt McMuscles claims that, even though the game didn’t move forward, Bendis repurposed the game’s story treatment, which became the “Death of a Goblin” arc in the Ultimate Spider-Man comic book. It’s a shame Ultimate Spider-Man 2 never happened. The original was a fun, unique Spider-Man game, and it would be nice to have some of Ultimate Spider-Man's activities in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 at the least.
Source: Matt McMuscles
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