The wind is whistling past my ears as I crawl up the side of the Empire State Building. Just as I think I’ve reached the top, I see there’s a mast: to scale it I have to jump over a jutting concrete platform. I actually have a slight feeling of vertigo. Then I reach the top and stand upright. Manhattan is laid out in all its glory below. The Hudson River glitters in the sunlight. It’s beautiful. So I jump off. A beautiful swan-dive through thousands of feet of rushing air. The walls of skyscrapers are a blur. At the last second, I sling a web-line outward and describe a graceful pendulum arc, before somersaulting forwards to continue my aerial journey through the streets.

Trance classic “As the Rush Comes” by Motorcycle is playing on my hi-fi. “Travelling somewhere, could be anywhere . . .” It could almost be about videogames. At least, the specific videogame experience that we might call “the rush”, that exhilarating zone where adrenaline soaks the brain, and you and machine are one. It took me by surprise in Spider-Man 2, since I don’t think I have played a game that engineered such a consistent rush since the glorious Wip3out.

The rush depends on beautiful and exciting movement through characterful spaces. You can find it in parts of Tomb Raider, or Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, or when riding Epona over Hyrule Field in Ocarina of Time. What makes Spider-Man 2 so special is that the developers have nailed an entirely new form of movement. Running, jumping, or piloting a vehicle suddenly look terribly staid and unoriginal by comparison. As may be expected from the developers of Tony Hawks, it’s a bit like a skateboarding sim in the sky, except that there is less of a fundamental structural disconnect between joypad actions and virtual responses. An analogue stick is just made for swinging, and recondite combos are needed only for ground-level fighting.

It also brilliantly demonstrates the virtues of an excellent control system: you can muddle through happily with it at first, but it is also deeply learnable. At first you swing around, bump into walls and drop regularly to the sidewalk, causing pedestrians to jump out of your way in annoyance, but you’re having fun anyway. You’re having enough fun to want to improve, and when you get to the stage where you can flip, swing, tumble and somersault exactly as you choose, when you can swing with mathematical beauty around corners and flip off lamp-posts, you *are* Spider-Man.

Furthermore, Spider-Man 2 offers a specifically *urban* rush. The big city, which for 19th-century novelists was the site of sin and corruption, becomes our playground. We are no longer owned by the city; we own it.

In a fascinating recent book about superheroes in popular culture, Matters of Gravity, author Scott Bukatman argues that the sight of superheroes pursuing their unfettered modes of locomotion through the real-life city works to domesticate the dehumanised concrete sprawl, to render the urban space more open and democratic. Superman can fly and has X-ray vision: the city presents no physical obstacles or secrets to him. It is the same reason why the real-life French climber Alain Robert, who has free-climbed the Sears Tower, the Eiffel Tower, and Canary Wharf, excites our wonder and admiration. He has said: “I free-climb buildings firstly because they exist, but also because they are the urban mountain.” And what is Robert’s nickname? Spider-Man, of course.

The real (that is to say, fictional) Spider-Man, too, can only do his thing where there are skyscrapers. London structures would not offer enough altitude for his web-slinging acrobatics. In Manhattan, he trumps the rigid, machinic grid system through his lovely arcing movements, as though writing something in a looping, cursive script that only God can read. And it is just this experience - of triumph over our metropolitan insignificance - that the game Spider-Man 2 makes available to us.

Something important changed, really, when around the time of Metropolis Street Racer videogames became able seriously to recreate real-life locations. Now a game can offer a precious extra thrill if you have had the experience of travelling to its location. The allure of a real locale: how about Spider-Man in Shibuya next time? Already, anyone who has been to New York cannot help but marvel at the verisimilitude of Spider-Man 2’s rendition of the city. Of course, your favourite Starbuck’s or Krispy Kreme is not here, there are not enough cars, and it’s all a bit shiny, but it is still recognisably New York. The developers’ decision to put a pair of huge searchlights at Ground Zero, meanwhile, represents a touch of grace and thoughtfulness that we don’t normally take for granted in the videogame medium.

Whether real or imaginary, cities are the new indoors. Games have begun to realise that the city is the ultimate play-space, and now they have the power to prove it. The next Grand Theft Auto is set in San Andreas. Half-Life 2 replaces the industrial corridors and alien landscapes of the original with a heavily urban feel. I can’t help feeling slightly less attracted by the more generically sci-fi vistas that we have so far seen of Halo 2.

Of course building a city to keep your game in does not guarantee a great experience: just look at The Getaway or Driv3r. But then look at the commercial success of these aesthetic duds: they are providing something people want, and I think that something is the urban rush. We have an automatical emotional familiarity with a city-scape, whether artistically designed or modelled on reality. We know the rules of the architecture and space, and are anxious to test them to breaking-point.

And there is no apparent limit to the possiblities. We have all, surely, wanted to play in an environment that recreates the vertically exuberant hover-car traffic of Luc Besson’s film The Fifth Element, but no one has quite nailed that yet. And I would love to see a new version of G-Police, one of those frustrating but intriguing 32-bit games whose conceptual ambition simply outstripped the hardware’s abilities at the time.

In a way, it’s payback. Technology, in the guise of the industrial revolution, gave birth to the grimy, overbearing super-metropolis. Now the technology of videogames gives us the power to soar above ant-level, to demonstrate cognitive mastery over the urban vastness. It’s time to reclaim the streets.

Steven Poole is the author of Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames (Fourth Estate, 7.99)

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