Insomniac Games and Spider-Man evidently make an excellent pairing - as demonstrated by the unanimously positive reviews and record-breaking sales. As recently revealed during an episode of IGN Unfiltered; this is in part due to the fact that the game studio got to choose which Marvel character they wanted to make a game based on.
Insomniac CEO Ted Price went into the inception of the now hit title: “Connie Booth, who is a great friends, and also one of our partners at Sony, was down at Insomniac and she said to me, one day, ‘What would you think about working on a Marvel game?' The answer was, ‘Are you crazy? Of course we’re going to work on a Marvel game!’” Price went onto reveal that they were offered a roster of characters to choose from: “(Marvel said) ‘Look, we’ve got a lot of characters. Pick a character that you guys think works for you, and then we’d love to hear your take on it.’”
While the CEO didn't specifically name-drop any other characters, he did explain why the studio was drawn to Spidey - that being that the Insomniac devs can easily relate to him: “He’s so human, and he’s so relatable. He’s also the most popular Marvel character in the world, I think, but it was more Peter and Spider-Man that drew us to that particular character.”
They also considered the game's now renowned traversal system, and as they'd just come off their previous title Sunset Overdrive, it only seemed right to go with another fast-paced freerunner: “We realized that this game we had just made, Sunset Overdrive, really does help us think about how we could take traversal to the next level in a Spider-Man game. Because we had been focusing on many of the same challenges within Sunset Overdrive. How do you traverse through a city quickly in an entertaining and skullful fashion without (it) being too hard or too easy?”
What do you think of Price's comments? Would you have liked for Insomniac to have tackled a different Marvel hero?
Marvel's Spider-Man is out now exclusively on PlayStation 4.