Spawn: The Eternal

Spawn: The Eternal is a beat 'em up consisting of 15 maze-like levels. The player takes on the role of Al Simmons, a former assassin who, after getting murdered by an associate, makes a deal with Malebolgia, the devil from the Eight Sphere of Hell, to reviving him; he will be part of the Devil's Own Army and come back to Earth as the titular superhero. Spawn, to free himself from this fate, goes through three different time periods named Street, Savage and Medieval to get to Tower of Hell to defeat Malebolgia, changing his costume to suit the time period.

In each stage, Spawn searches for and collects hints, tools, health, and keys to doors leading to other sections in a third-person adventure exploration mode a la Tomb Raider. Most of the stages consist of one large flat floor, with a small amount of large platform gaps and stairways to other floors. In the adventure mode, Spawn, with tank controls, can run and jump, with a punch-kick combination used for breaking through doors and crates among other obstacles.

Development on the game began in early 1995 at Sony Interactive Studios America, who was known at the time for sport games and racing games such as Jet Moto and Twisted Metal. The game's original format was scrapped in 1996 so that it could be redesigned in the same style as the innovative Tomb Raider, leading to the development cycle being stretched out to two years. A release date was announced for August 1997 to be released around the same time the Spawn film was released in theaters, but pushed back to December due to further delays.

All of the character animations were recorded at Sony's in-house motion capture studio in San Diego.

Upon its appearance on store shelves, Spawn: The Eternal was declared by critics one of the worst all-time video games, overall and in the categories of film tie-ins and PS1 games. The game continued to be considered one of the worst video games of all-time in later decades, including for comic book superhero video games. The game massively disappointed critics due to the high quality of the comics and its media adaptations and toys.

The graphics were considered by several critics to be ugly, filled with pop-ups, repetitive and sloppy texturing, and excessive pixelation and blockiness. The texture mapping's pixelation, blockiness and amount of detail was noted by GameSpot and UK's Play magazine to make the positions of characters hard to decipher. IGN and the UK's Play magazine perceived Spawn's appearance as similar to an ape.