Marvel's Spider-Man

• 1. A Taunt in 2014

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  Marvel's Spider-Man, a series of superhero action-adventure games from Insomniac Games, began with a taunt. In 2014, Marvel Games vice president Jay Ong sat across from executives at Activision, the publisher whose Marvel licence was about to end. One of them asked what he planned to do with the character after he got it back. Ong answered that he needed to "find a better home for it". The Activision representative shot back, "Good luck finding your unicorn."

  The unicorn turned up at Sony Interactive Entertainment, and the games it produced are published for PlayStation consoles and Windows. They follow two heroes, Peter Parker and Miles Morales, who both fight crime in New York City while juggling their ordinary lives. The series is now more than a single character's adventures. It is the anchor of a shared universe with its own spin-offs, comics, novels and a very public security breach. This documentary asks why a licence that kept producing rushed games suddenly produced hits, who bet on it, and how far the idea has spread.

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• 2. A Deal Built for Movies

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  Since 1998, Activision had developed and published most video games based on Marvel characters, and Spider-Man appeared in several of them from 2000 onward. He was sometimes the playable lead and sometimes a supporting figure. Jay Ong reflected in 2016 that the terms of the deal were the problem. Games had to be tied to upcoming Marvel films, which forced short development periods.

  Ong said it was "difficult to succeed" under those conditions. In some cases, he said, "there wasn't enough time to come out with something truly terrific". Marvel Games grew dissatisfied with what the publisher was shipping. It ended the partnership in 2014, just before the release of the movie tie-in game The Amazing Spider-Man 2.

  That left Marvel with a famous character and no publisher. Ong's next task was to decide what kind of partner could reverse the pattern.

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• 3. Shopping for a Partner

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  Ong's stated goal was to find "a publishing partner who hadn't adopted the 'crappy licensed games' mentality". He also wanted one with "a vested interest that would benefit from building a franchise". The benchmark was the Batman: Arkham series from WB Games and Rocksteady Studios. That series is credited with legitimizing and popularizing games adapted from comic book characters.

  Three companies were considered to lead Marvel's new push into AAA games: Microsoft Studios, Sony Interactive Entertainment and Nintendo. Nintendo was ruled out at first because of the technical limits of the Nintendo Switch. Its perceived loyalty to its own characters counted against it too, though it later worked with Marvel on Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order in 2019. Microsoft declined because it wanted to build its own properties. It would later work with Marvel on Marvel's Blade, through the publisher Bethesda Softworks.

  Sony was the one that said yes. Ong met Sony executives Adam Boyes and John Drake to pitch an overall development deal. His hope was to "beat Arkham and have one game at least and maybe multiple games that could drive adoption" of PlayStation platforms. Sony then had to pick a studio, and its vice president of product development, Connie Booth, headed to Insomniac Games to talk with CEO Ted Price. Those first discussions were held off the record.

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• 4. Why Peter Parker

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  Ted Price was described as "fairly neutral" about making a game from a Marvel property. Insomniac had worked only on its own original franchises until then. His development team, by comparison, was enthusiastic. Marvel let the studio choose any of its characters, and the team picked Spider-Man because they could relate to the pairing of the hero with his everyman alter ego.

  Creative director Bryan Intihar put it this way: "I feel like he's the most relatable of the heroes. As much as I love Tony Stark, it's harder to identify with a billionaire. As much as I love Thor, it's hard to identify with a god. Peter makes mistakes, he has ups and downs in his career, his relationships, his family. I think we can all relate to that". Price agreed that Spider-Man "is so human, and he's so relatable". He added that he thought him "the most popular Marvel character in the world".

  The popularity was also the danger. The team found the character daunting because of the huge number of existing comic and screen versions. Art director Jacinda Chew met that challenge by studying online resources and questioning Marvel staff until she had deep knowledge of him. Price saw a technical upside as well. The dynamic traversal system in Insomniac's earlier game Sunset Overdrive could be built upon for web-swinging.

  Spider-Man became the first licensed property Insomniac had ever developed, in a studio that was then 22 years old.

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• 5. Four Releases, Two Heroes

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  In September 2018, Marvel's Spider-Man arrived on the PlayStation 4, set eight years into Peter Parker's career. Its main villain is Mister Negative, a super-human crime lord who plots to seize New York's criminal underworld. He threatens to release a deadly virus with help from a group of escaped supervillains called the Sinister Six. Peter is aided by his former Daily Bugle colleague and ex-girlfriend Mary Jane Watson, police captain Yuri Watanabe, and Miles Morales, the son of officer Jefferson Davis.

  The game then grew through downloadable episodes under the title The City That Never Sleeps. Three episodes came out monthly from October to December 2018. They pit Spider-Man against the physically enhanced mob boss Hammerhead. Felicia Hardy, a thief and former lover, and Silver Sablinova, who runs the mercenary group Sable International, help him.

  In November 2020, the original game and all three episodes were collected as Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered, a launch title for the PlayStation 5. It offered a "Fidelity Mode" with real-time ray tracing and a "Performance Mode" that raised the framerate. It also introduced a reworked Peter Parker model captured from Ben Jordan, replacing the original actor John Bubinak. That change drew a mixed response. The support studio Nixxes Software brought the remaster to Windows in August 2022.

  Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales landed the same month as the remaster, in November 2020. Peter and Mary Jane leave on a trip to Symkaria for a few weeks. That leaves Miles as New York's only Spider-Man, defending his new home of Harlem. The neighborhood is caught between the Roxxon Energy Corporation and a high-tech criminal army called the Underground, led by the Tinkerer. Insomniac called it a standalone adventure. Comparisons were drawn to Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, a smaller game that also stood apart from its parent series.

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• 6. Reception and Sales

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  Marvel's Spider-Man sold 3.3 million units in its first three days, counting copies bundled with PlayStation 4 consoles. That beat the 3.1 million set earlier in 2018 by God of War and made it the fastest-selling first-party release in Sony's history. Final Fantasy VII Remake later passed it with 3.5 million in the same span. USA Today estimated that the game earned at least $198 million for Sony in that period, against a domestic box office of $117 million for the film Spider-Man: Homecoming in 2017.

  Critics cited the 2018 game as one of the best comic-book games ever made. VentureBeat and Game Informer compared it favorably to Batman: Arkham Asylum, the game it had been meant to rival. The web-swinging and traversal drew particular praise, and IGN noted that the depth of combat left room for improvisation. USGamer called the story the game's strongest aspect, while GamesRadar+ said its characters were voiced and performed with unexpected depth and charisma.

  The records kept coming. By July 2019, it was the best-selling game based on a comic book character, ahead of the combined lifetime sales of Batman: Arkham City. It became one of the best-selling Western-developed PlayStation 4 titles in Japan, behind only Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 and Minecraft.

  Miles Morales did well too. It had sold over 6.5 million copies by July 2021, and Jeff Grubb of VentureBeat reported in April 2021 that it had outsold both The Last of Us Part II and Ghost of Tsushima. Marvel's Spider-Man 2 sold over five million units in ten days. By the 14th of February 2024, it stood at 10 million, and the whole series had passed 50 million copies.

  The Windows release of the remaster opened with a concurrent peak of 63,384 players on Steam, the second largest debut for a PlayStation Studios title there. Only God of War had done better.

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• 7. Beyond the Console

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  On the 26th of September 2018, Marvel Comics published the crossover event Spider-Geddon, written by Christos Gage. It brought Insomniac's Peter Parker into the larger Marvel multiverse and labeled his world "Earth-1048". In the story he joins the Superior Spider-Army, led by Otto Octavius, against the Inheritors. A message Octavius secretly leaves for his game counterpart hints that the game's version of him might one day become the Superior Spider-Man too.

  The same Peter Parker appears briefly in the animated film Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse in 2023, with Yuri Lowenthal returning to voice him. He is a member of the Spider-Society led by Miguel O'Hara. In that film, Miles Morales's friend Ganke Lee is also seen playing Marvel's Spider-Man 2 on a PlayStation 5. The first game's Advanced Suit had already shown up in the Spider-Lair of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse in 2018.

  Marvel Comics launched its Gamerverse label in March 2019 with City at War. This six-issue adaptation was written by Dennis Hopeless, with art by Luca Maresca. Velocity and The Black Cat Strikes followed. Titan Books published the prequel novel Hostile Takeover by David Liss on the 21st of August 2018. A second novel, Wings of Fury by Brittney Morris, followed on the 10th of November 2020. Composer John Paesano scored every released game, and the Miles Morales soundtrack included vocal tracks by Jaden Smith and Lecrae.

  On the 12th of December 2024, a free update added Peter Parker and Miles Morales as unlockable bots in Astro Bot, a nod from one PlayStation hit to another.

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• 8. A Shared Universe Under Pressure

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  Marvel's Wolverine was announced in September 2021 at the PlayStation Showcase, and it is set for release on the PlayStation 5 in September 2026. Insomniac had pushed for it throughout the making of the first Spider-Man game. The team was drawn to a shared moral compass, in that "both heroes feel deeply compelled to defend people who are less able to do so". It takes place in the same continuity as the Spider-Man games.

  In December 2023, the hacking group Rhysida breached roughly 1.67 terabytes of Insomniac data, including development documents, financial forecasts and sensitive information about employees. The group set a deadline of seven days and opened an auction with a starting price of 50 Bitcoin, equivalent to US$2 million. When the deadline passed, the stolen material was published online.

  The leak mostly concerned Marvel's Wolverine. It also revealed a standalone Venom game, a Marvel's Spider-Man 3 aiming internally for 2028 and possibly split into two parts, and a canceled multiplayer game called Marvel's Spider-Man: The Great Web. It also revealed Marvel's X-Men, expected to follow Wolverine as the second game of a trilogy. An internal presentation indicated that Insomniac had signed an agreement to make licensed X-Men games until 2035. Spider-Man 2's co-writers later confirmed that Miles Morales would be considered the main Spider-Man in future entries.

  The Venom game's fate remains disputed. In April 2026, Nadji Jeter said it had been canceled after the death of Tony Todd in 2024, but it was soon suggested the game was still in the works as of March 2026. Windows releases are also in doubt, since in February 2026 Sony was reported to have withdrawn PC support for its single-player PlayStation Studios games, a stance Herman Hulst backed in May 2026.

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