The first Marvel video game was created by a nuclear engineer. We never heard from her again

We have Marvel everywhere. Not just in comics (in fact, perhaps less in comics than anywhere else), but in movies, series, theme parks, and pop culture in general. There is no one who doesn’t know Iron Man, Spider-Man, or Hulk, and the proof of this is how well all their video games continue to perform, from Marvel Rivals to the well-known Spider-Man by Insomniac. However, this love story between superheroes and video games does not come from now, but from a whopping 44 years ago, when Atari received the game of a certain web-slinger that became one of the most popular of the time… although we would never hear about its creator again.

Do what a spider does

You probably know Parker Brothers (now Hasbro) for their board games, such as Monopoly, Clue, Risk, Ouija, or Scrabble, but back in the day, trying not to fall behind, they also opened a branch dedicated exclusively to video games. And they were not exactly small: in the final half of 1982, they earned 74 million dollars thanks to their Star Wars games or this Spider-man, and somehow became giants in the industry, although they gradually abandoned it.

The challenge was not small: to take a character with 20 years of history (and quite a convoluted one, too) and turn him not only into a comic book hero but also into a pixelated one. For this, they enlisted the help of Marvel and created an alternative story in which Norman Osborn becomes the Green Goblin again and escapes from prison with the intention of blowing up the Empire State Building with a super bomb. Will he be able to catch him before he succeeds? Well, that’s where the player comes in: the whole game involves climbing a building, disarming bombs, and fighting against some enemies that appear randomly without falling.

Ah, yes: in addition, you had a fluid meter to make webs (with which you could move between different parts of the building), and if you ran out of it, you would fall to the ground and lose a life. The classic Parker luck. The curious thing is that the game’s director, Laura Nikolich had no intention of ending up making video games. In fact, she studied computer programming and ended up working at a nuclear plant programming the systems. In other words, a fully-fledged nuclear engineer… until Atari contacted her. Partly to meet a female quota, and partly because she was one of the few people at that time who really knew how to program.

In fact, he had absolute creative control, and even before his death in 2024, he claimed that this was the best stage of his life. However, he wasn’t necessarily a fan of comics: if the Green Goblin appeared in the game, it wasn’t because he was a Marvel fan, but because it was much easier to include him as a character, since he used the same algorithm as Spider-Man. Believe it or not, it was a huge success, and Atari 2600 fans still hold it dear in their hearts.

And so, if she managed to make it big, did Nikolich, our favorite gaming nuclear engineer, have a long career in video games? Well… As you might guess from the date, no. In 1983, E.T caused the industry crash, and she was one of the first to be let go from the offices, while working on a Care Bears game that would never see the light of day, according to her, because of marketing. We only heard from her once more, in 1984, when she directed the ColecoVision version of Frogger II. From there, she disappeared. Well, more or less: two of her children work in the industry, one at DICE and another at Bungie. In the end, the pixels as fists were worth something more than just a good memory.