As part of the recent PlayStation 5 reveal event, Insomniac Games showed off Spider-Man:
Miles Morales, a new follow-up to the studio’s hit game about everyone’s favourite wall
crawler.
While Miles appears as a supporting character in the original game, this time around he’s
going to take centre stage, becoming the PS5’s primary Spider-Man.
What’s interesting about this is the fact that Insomniac hadn’t originally planned
to make Miles a big part of their video game’s world.
Initially, Miles was going to appear as a post-credit tease in Marvel’s Spider-Man,
as little more than an Easter Egg for fans.
There were absolutely no plans to make him playable in any form.
Miles Morales debuted in the comics in 2011, as an alternate universe version of Spider-Man.
Fans absolutely loved this new take on the character, so eventually, Marvel’s writers
came up with an excuse to let Miles cross travel through dimensional barriers to live
in the main comics universe.
While he’s now probably best known as the star of the Academy award-winning cartoon
Into the Spider-Verse, during the development of Marvel’s Spider-Man for the PS4, he was
still something of a niche character.
The team at Insomniac are enormous Spider-Man fans, but they didn’t want their game to
overwhelm newcomers that didn’t know too much about the character’s fifty year comic
book history.
As such, when working on the first draft of the game’s script, it was decided that having
Miles appear through a dimensional portal, as in the comics, would be a bit much for
players.
Then, creative director Bryan Intihar decided to give Miles another look.
He said: “I had read the Miles comics over the years
but I went, ‘Lemme read them again’, and I started getting more and more into them,
and I said, ‘Is there any way we could put him more in there?’
And we talked a lot about making this a very unique universe, something like the familiar
and the fresh.
Familiar but still have it mix things up.”
Bryan went to Bill Roseman, his point of contact with Marvel, and pitched the idea of including
Miles in the game’s story in a meaningful way.
The plan was to keep things simple: Miles didn’t come through a portal, there was
no Spider-Verse style dimension hopping.
Bryan said: “What if we have Miles in the world?
But it wasn’t some kind of dimensional portal he comes through, that he just lives there,
you know, he’s 15 years old, he’s a huge Spider-Man fan?”
Bill responded, “Go for it!”
So, the team started building Miles into the story of the game, giving him some dramatic
cutscenes.
This, though, wasn’t enough.
Bryan was thinking about all the side characters in the game.
Yes, this was a Spider-Man game, but it was also about his friends.
According to Bryan: “What we really wanted to do was show a
superhero world from all different angles…What is it like to be in that world and not have
super powers?
Just a different perspective of the world.
If you have a character playable you can have a much more fulfilling arc for that character.”
So, Bryan went to his team with a suggestion.
What if, as well as playing as Spider-Man, the game also let you play as Peter Parker?
Everyone agreed that, yes, that made sense, sure.
Then Bryan pushed further.
Wouldn’t Mary Jane’s arc be more satisfying she was playable as well as part of her investigations?
…Yes, the team admitted, that was possible.
Finally, Bryan pushed again.
What about making Miles playable too?
To their credit, the team really worked together to make Miles’ gameplay sections as interesting
as possible.
According to Bryan: “That Miles mission at City Hall?
That really came together because the designer really got into the narrative and got into
the experience and said ‘Here’s how I would make this feel emotional for him’,
and then it was the lighting and the environment people, we really invested a lot of time and
effort into those scenes.”
Together, the team at Insomniac fleshed out Miles’ role to make him an interesting,
engaging character with his o wn arc in the story.
After that, it made perfect sense to continue the story of Spider-Man by giving Miles a
real chance to shine.
The moral of the story is that it’s nice to get a fresh perspective sometimes.
Because the team at Insomniac wanted to feature a diverse range of characters in the original
Marvel’s Spider-Man game, players now have the chance to enjoy a fresh take on a familiar
superhero.