The Experience: Spidey saves the day!

The Trick: A great story and some intimidating supervillains

The most important part of the story, of course, is Spidey himself. Universal chose to make him an occasional participant rather than ubiquitous throughout the ride. Generally speaking, any time you see the Webslinger, bad stuff is about to go down. Alternately, it already has, and you need a superhero to save the day.

The explanation for all the drama is that Doctor Octopus has brought together a team of five supervillains. As is usually the case in comics, they have an overly dramatic terrorist plan. It involves the Statue of Liberty and an anti-gravity ray. Nobody who owns an anti-gravity ray uses it for goodness and decency.

Sure enough, the Sinister Syndicate causes chaos throughout New York City. They also hate cub reporters from The Daily Bugle, which is why Electro tries to fry you, Hydro-Man tries to drown you, and Scream, well, screams at you. The genius of the ride involves the usage of 3D to cause the danger to feel real.

Thanks to clever use of heat and the positioning of The Scoop relative to the projection screen, a Green Goblin flaming pumpkin actually looks AND feels like it’s coming right at you. In that moment, you fully believe that you’re in the midst of a comic book battle between good and evil. The Spidey ride delivers immersive ride engineering performed masterfully.

The seminal moment occurs when that infernal anti-gravity ray lifts The Scoop 40 stories in the air. At this point, the cub reporter seems certain to meet his doom at the hands of villainy. As the vehicle falls at a terrifying velocity, all hope ceases…until a heroic teenager spins a giant web that saves every passenger at the last possible moment.

I won’t spoil the trick here, but Universal deserves all the credit in the world for this feat. They convince the rider that they’re hundreds of feet in the air, that they’re falling to their death-splat, and that they’re heroically stopped from dying by Spider-Man all in the course of a few seconds. That bit alone differentiates The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man from all over attractions.

The Experience: a new paint job

The Trick: a 2012 update

Universal Studios executives clearly have a soft spot for their first motion simulation attraction. That’s why they invested a great deal of money to modernize it a few years ago. The explanation for the project is fairly simple. Have you watched a CGI movie like Toy Story lately? Or looked at CGI cut scenes from a videogame like Final Fantasy VII? They’re comically dated, a by-product of the amazing innovations in graphics simulation.

The Spider-Man ride suffered from these same issues prior to its update. The graphics looked dated, which distracted away from the quality of the experience. Similarly, the one thing that engineers couldn’t test while building the ride was how The Scoop vehicles would handle over time. Eventually, synching them with the projectors proved difficult due to the degradation of the hardware involved. The blurring effect I mentioned above had become a serious concern by this point.

Universal engineers took this opportunity to shut down the ride and give it a tune-up. The result is that when The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man V2.0 opened in 2012, the graphics were vastly improved. Employees future-proofed the attraction by adding video with 4K resolution. At 2160p, it likely has twice the picture quality of your home television unless you’re an early adopter. That’s why engineers involved with the project can brag that the stitches in Spider-Man’s gloves are now visible. The ride features some of the best graphics available, and the blurring issues caused by shaky 3D and synchronization mishaps are now a thing of the past. Due to the improvements, the Spidey ride has once again claimed a spot on top of the dark ride industry.

PS: Marvel movies have a tradition of featuring Stan Lee cameos. See how many times you can spot him during the ride.