Within the heart of Manhattan, lay a sophisticated and unscrupulous corporate survivalist group, the Life Foundation, who were founded in response to Cold War paranoia, and is dedicated to constructing doomsday-proof communities for both its own members and society's elite, who can reserve a spot in these facilities for a minimum payment of over five billion dollars. In order to achieve their goals, the members have been dealing in secrets for nearly sixty years, such as opening an illegal black markets to the criminal underworld and even stealing money from the banks by hiring mercenaries to do the job. It was at that time the Life Foundation hires Chance to steal European armaments being shipped to Manhattan, but then their leader, Carlton Drake, betray Chance after he return from the heist and tortured him to reveal how his powered exoskeleton works so that it can be mass-produced for the Life Foundation's benefit. But little did they realize that a upcoming hero by the name of Spider-Man, who had been tracking Chance after the heist, end up discovering their base and releases Chance from imprisonment, to which resulted them to work together and destroy the Life Foundation's base. Soon afterward, Spider-Man began causing trouble to the Life Foundation future plans and end up foiling each one of them.
Yet by the Life Foundation soon got a new problem by another superhuman by the name of Venom, who has been interfering with one of the member goal of finding a lost stockpile of gold that was believe to be beneath a park in San Francisco. One of the Life Foundation's Board of Directors, Roland Treece, decided to captures Venom and extracts from him five additional symbiotes that it gives to a quintet of its soldiers, creating Scream, Phage, Riot, Lasher, and Agony. The new symbiotes commit random acts of violence throughout San Francisco to test their capabilities, drawing the attention of Spider-Man, who follows Scream back to a Life Foundation installation situated in the Mojave Desert. Spider-Man and an escaped Venom team-up to combat the symbiotes, seemingly killing the creatures and depowering their hosts, a development that prompts the Life Foundation into abandoning and destroying the Mojave facility. However, the five symbiotes and their hosts somehow survive the explosion and are recovered by the Life Foundation, but they soon had decided to turn against their creator's before fleeing to New York City. What happen afterward was that in time Scream had betray and killed her allies, though the remaining symbiotes merged together to become "Hybrid", while Scream was eventually killed by Eddie Brook.
The Life Foundation sets up anew in Washington, D.C. hires the Jury and a mercenary named Spoiler to replace the symbiote warriors, and begins stealing artifacts and other valuables to stockpile in their doomsday bunkers, still believing in the imminence of World War III. When Carlton Drake is diagnosed with terminal cancer, he has the Life Foundation pose as a government branch and offer funding to Toshiro Mikashi, an entomology professor working on an arachnid-based cure for cancer and other ailments called "the Arachnis Project". Mikashi eventually realizes who his backers really are and that they intend to exploit his work by using it to create a new race of Homo Arachnis, so the Life Foundation keeps him compliant by threatening his daughter. In the end, Mikashi reluctantly completes the Arachnis Project formula by using a sample of the captive Spider-Man's DNA, and gives it Roland Treece, who injects Drake with it, intending for it to kill him (as it was meant to be ingested) and thus allow him to usurp control of the Life Foundation. The concoction instead successfully transforms Drake into Homo Arachnis(Man-Spider), which goes on rampage, devouring Life Foundation personnel while combating Spider-Man, the mutinying Jury, and the recently arrived Venom. After Venom traps Drake and evacuates with everyone else in the installation, Mikashi sacrifices himself by sabotaging the base's nuclear reactor in order to cause an explosion that will eliminate all traces of the Arachnis Project, while the blast was contained by the building shielding, to which prevent it from affecting Washington. With the destruction of the company last facility and the remaining members of the Board gone, the Life Foundation was now at the edge of being closed down and dissolve away into nothingness.
