While Todd McFarlane waits out the writers and actors’ strikes so he can finally regain momentum on his Spawn film, his signature character is joining one of the best-selling video game franchises of all time. Activision has just revealed Spawn will be appearing in Call of Duty's Season 6 battle pass as part of the game's annual The Haunting event.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone players who purchase the Season 6 pass will immediately unlock a new playable Operator in Al Simmons, Spawn’s Mortal World identity. Spawn will also a "more tactical" skin at the start of the battle pass, with another skin unlocking at tier 100.
For a more scorched Spawn, there's a "burned Spawn" skin in the pass as well, in addition to other new skins depicting his various friends and foes. Check them out in the screenshots and descriptions below.
Burned Spawn (Al Simmons Skin) - Prior to his transformation into Spawn, Al Simmons was deceived and burned alive. This shrouded figure is one of many forms Spawn takes.
Creepy Clown (Fender Skin) - A hell-born half-demon of considerable power and deviancy, the arch-villain Violator has taken the form of a rotund clown to anger Spawn.
Violator (König Skin) - Closer to the true form, the cruel and arrogant Violator brings “death on two legs” in the form of a grotesquely headed Operator to further infuriate Spawn.
Disruptor (Horangi Skin) - Masquerading as a businessman and responsible for the death and transformation of Al Simmons, Disruptor is known by many names and is feared as a crime lord.
Soul Crusher (Vega Skin) - A mysterious rival of Spawn’s, Soul Crusher is an enigmatic figure, using noxious gasses to asphyxiate his victims into submission.
Nikto Spawn (Nikto Skin) - Operator Nikto favors a similar tactical look and impressive mask getup and takes it to the next level with this Spawn homage.
Spawn is no stranger to video games, having starred in his own titles dating back to 1995 and Spawn: The Video Game for SNES and also appearances in Mortal Kombat and Soulcalibur II. But joining the iconic Call of Duty license was something that McFarlane admits caught him by surprise. When asked how the deal was made in an interview with IGN, McFarlane says that “I crawled to their home office on my hands and knees and I begged and said I was going to go on a starvation strike and they said they had already sent an email.”
Jokes aside, the comic book creator and toy mogul says what actually happened is that Activision reached out about collaborating with Todd McFarlane Productions about bringing their headliner into the Call of Duty world. “I guess you'll have to ask them why Spawn made it on their list but they gave me a phone call,” he recalls. “I'd worked with Activision and some of their people in the past on prior projects, not necessarily Call of Duty, so I knew a couple of the guys there and they made the ask.”
Once the ask was made, McFarlane wasted no time saying “yes.” “I went, what? Spawn gets to be in a triple-A brand? Look, anytime you can get attached and you get to ride on the coattails of something that big, you take those shots every single time,” he says.
McFarlane was in contact with the Activision team on a regular basis to ensure Spawn was integrated into the Call of Duty universe in a way that made sense for fans of the game.
“My rule always whenever I lend Spawn out, especially when he is going outside of his comfort zone, is I assume that the vast majority of people do not know who or what Spawn is,” McFarlane explains. “They don't know who I am, they don't know what Image Comics is, they don't know any of that. They're just basically video game and particularly Call of Duty fanatics. And so the rule is always the same, create and make something with this character.”
Considering how he’s built an empire in part by maintaining his creative control over the Spawn IP, it is somewhat surprising to hear how open McFarlane is to having others utilize his creation in other media formats. But he says being flexible in that regard better serves Spawn in the long run. “I'm going to give you a wide berth to do whatever you need to do to integrate Spawn into your game so he doesn't look like an outsider and go from there. That way, somebody who's been a fan of the game for the last eight years, all of a sudden might see one of the iterations of one of the characters they're doing and go, ‘Man, that's going to be my favorite guy.’ And a year from now, somebody's going to tap him on the shoulder and say, ‘Hey, do you know that guy comes from a comic book?’”
McFarlane spoke to IGN while he was in a car returning home from a trip to Los Angeles and the Activision studios, where he laid eyes on the final Spawn character designs. “I was approving a bunch of stuff to see it in hi-def on their cameras, because you know, on Zoom your resolution is only so good, right? They were constantly showing me visuals and I thought they looked good on Zoom, but I was blown away seeing it on a computer,” he says. “The original, the OG Spawn, it’s tough to camouflage that guy. He's got a costume, he's got a cape, he doesn't look super military. But the [game] designers put a ton of military on [the character] to make him look seamless within the game."
Bringing a supernatural antihero into the virtual military battlefield of Call of Duty may not make sense at first glance, but McFarlane notes that Al Simmons’ backstory is steeped in the military. “Look at the character Spawn, who is Lieutenant Colonel Al Simmons, right? He’s got a military background. It’s been part of his story literally since issue number one, because I intentionally made it so that he shouldn't use his superpowers all the time,” McFarlane says. “So he has to rely on his natural skill. And part of those natural skills were the ones that he honed when he was in the military when he was younger before he became Spawn. So having Spawn in a military game is not trying to put a round peg in a square hole.”
Spawn continues to be a popular ongoing title under the Image Comics umbrella, and stands as the longest-running independent comic book of all time. The character’s legacy has been bolstered by its numerous appearances in other media, especially video games. In many ways, games have done a better job keeping Spawn in the mainstream of pop culture than any other form of entertainment media.
“Why are the video game people way ahead of the game and understand it way more than Hollywood? I don't know,” McFarlane says. “We're going to have a big conversation with Hollywood about that someday.”
McFarlane is already thinking about what comes next once Spawn debuts in Call of Duty, and believes that his long-gestating Spawn movie could play a part in a return appearance.
“Here's my expectation, I don't know what [Activision’s] criteria is and what their matrix is of having something work and be a success, right? But I've got so many other looks of Spawn and other characters in the Spawn world that we can easily come back into the pool and do this again and again and again if it makes sense,” he says. “Oh, by the way, in the future, when that movie comes and fingers crossed it works, then it will just make it easier for us to circle back around to the good people at Activision and say, ‘Hey guys, we were just getting warmed up. Now we've got a whole globe that knows who Spawn is because they went to the movies.”
Spawn will join Call of Duty on Sept. 27.
