An eventually canceled Daredevil game looked to borrow the grinding aspect from the popular Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series in 2003.
A Daredevil video game entered production with developer 5000ft, Inc. with some help from Marvel and Sony. Video game YouTube channel PtoPOnline chronicles the story of the ill-fated game.
While in development, Sony insisted that the game included a grind action featured in Tony Hawk: Pro Skater. The Tony Hawk series debuted about 4 years earlier in 1999 and proved to be a large success. Players in the would-be Daredevil game would be able to grind on electrified wires and pipes as the titular hero to navigate the environment and make it from building to building.
While it may have been practical for Sony to find inspiration in an already proven video game franchise, the video notes that this idea was not employed well, pointing out that "One of the strangest choices was to make the wires electrified. Meaning [players] could actually die quickly even from grinding. So to say it doesn't work well is an understatement."
The video goes on to mention that "other levels don't use electrified wires, instead using complex pipes, which show up in static form...but in practice it doesn't quite come together." The video makes a comparison to another game that successfully implemented this feature: "In an ideal world, with budget and time, getting to even a fraction of what Sunset Overdrive would do a decade later would've been amazing, but here we are."
This wouldn't have been the only feature the game would look to borrow. The video notes that the doomed game tried to tie swinging into the game, following the Spider-Man 2 video game. Players would have been able to use Daredevil's billy club to swing around the levels, but this also came up short. The game was originally set to be released in early 2003 before being pushed back to late 2003 and canceled sometime after that.
Several gaming generations later, superhero video games are still coming full force, thanks in part to the success of the Batman: Arkham Asylum video game series. This year alone has seen the release of two Marvel-inspired video game properties. The first being Marvel's Avengers and the other the highly anticipated Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales -- set to release with the launch of the PlayStation 5.
Source: YouTube