While we've gotten plenty of excellent Spider-Man games over the years, Spider-Man 2: Enter: Electro for PS1 is not a particularly notable moment in the character's history – except for the part where it was delayed and censored in the wake of the destruction of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001. For years, fans have sought a legendary lost cutscene said to be in the original version of the game, and it's only now been saved from the realm of lost media by what amounts to pure happenstance.
Enter: Electro was published by Activision and developed by Vicarious Visions as a sequel to Neversoft's 2000 Spider-Man game. While the original game got strong reviews and released across a wide array of platforms, Enter: Electro got a somewhat more tepid response upon its PS1-exclusive release – being released in a year with a new console generation against games ranging from Halo to Grand Theft Auto 3 will do that, I guess.
Notably, Enter: Electro was originally set to have a final boss battle on top of the World Trade Center. There's some debate about when the game originally launched – there are some claims that it originally released in August, but was recalled, while other sources suggested it was originally scheduled to launch on September 18. Either way, Activision was keen to scrub the game clean of any references to the World Trade Center for obvious reasons, and the censored version was eventually released on October 18.
One popular rumor suggested that among the casualties of the revised version was an ending cutscene featuring a cameo from Thor. It was never clear where this rumor sprung from, and while pre-9/11 versions of the game eventually surfaced, the cutscene was never present. Many chalked it up as a pure myth.
But as the Lost Media Wiki notes, that changed in 2023 when fans started digging into archives of Activision's old website. There, they found an image of the long-rumored Thor cutscene and an invitation to download it – it was definitive proof that the scene existed, but sadly the download itself was not part of the archive.
Two years passed, then a miraculous bit of happenstance came about, when a Reddit user who goes by Bobbyfan85 happened to be reading the Lost Media Wiki article linked just above. "I knew I had downloaded it years ago when it was released," Bobbyfan85 says on r/LostMedia. "So I dug out my old hard drives and found it! It says I downloaded it on October 16, 2001."
Bobbyfan85 uploaded the video to Instagram and a clean, unwatermarked version has also been saved on the Internet Archive. By the twin miracles of luck and data hoarding, the cutscene is lost media no more.
Still, some mysteries persist. Why wasn't the cutscene present in the original version of the game? Why, if it was cut as part of the post-9/11 changes, was it still available on Activision's website months later? Did it get cut earlier for unrelated reasons? Did the devs decide that a Thor cameo was good marketing, but a bad ending? Maybe these questions will get their own answers someday, but for now we can at least see the cutscene that spawned them in the first place.
Enter: Electro's predecessor still ranks among the best Spider-Man games out there.
