Marvel’s Spider-Man was a major triumph when it came out on the PS4 back in 2018. The game featured a very on-point Peter Parker, a cast of characters and villains that were beautifully shown off, and a set of gameplay mechanics that helped players feel like Spider-Man himself. The remastered version of the game recently came out on PC and PS5 and fans are still very much in love with the game–so much so that the team at Insomniac Games is revealing some brand new information about the title for the first time, including how the opening of the game was influenced by a beloved movie.
If you recall, in Marvel’s Spider-Man, you start the game with Peter Parker who has been Spider-Man for 8 years when we first meet him. As a result of this, the opening features a shot of Peter’s apartment (that he’s soon evicted from). Players see everything from the work that he’s done on his suit, to clippings of his past victories, and so on. If that feels familiar to you, that’s because it’s a similar opening to what was done with Back to the Future. In that movie, you saw a similar opening that featured glimpses of the relationship between Doc Brown and Marty McFly so that when they met up later in the movie, you knew that they were friends already.
It was indeed a pretty clever way to go and set things up, not to mention make a callback to all that has happened before. As fans of the game know, the title starts out by focusing on Wilson Fisk and him finally being taken down as the Kingpin. But then the rest of the game is mostly about new villains that this version of Spider-Man hasn’t faced before, like Martin Li, aka Mr. Negative, and the eventual rise of Doctor Octopus.
The use of the lore of the Spider-Man world was very well handled by Insomniac Games throughout the title and its DLC, and the Miles Morales game that followed on PS5, mainly because it explored the lore and history of the characters, but also made key changes to help make their version of the world unique and special. As well as offering up new opportunities for characters that they honestly don’t have in the comics. It also served to open things up for the sequel that we know is coming.
For example, we know that Norman Osborne isn’t the Green Goblin yet, and that Harry might become Venom based on a certain stinger image. Mary Jane is an associate editor, which is much different than the comics, and so on and so forth.
One can only wonder what movie references await us when the sequel arrives on PS5. Oh, and hopefully PC eventually!
Source: IGN
