There’s been plenty of chatter about Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 since its launch one week ago. Many were surprised by various events in the game, and others are already curious about what the third game in the series will be when it potentially arrives. However, the team at Insomniac Games has been sharing some unique insights into the title about stuff that didn’t make the cut. It’s only natural that some ideas were left on the cutting room floor for one reason or another. But when it came to the game’s opening villain, Sandman, they would take things in a WHOLE new direction.
Creative Director Bryan Intihar told IGN that in early talks about Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, they would have the Venom symbiote infect the Sandman, “we did have a Venomized Sandman concept.” That might sound odd at first, but Marvel Comics has made it VERY clear over the various arcs with Venom that the symbiote can pretty much infect anything it wants and give them a “boost.” It’s even been used as a plot point for several events and character arcs.
So, given how unique that would’ve looked in the game, you have to wonder, “Why didn’t they do that?”
“It was hard enough to make Sandman. No, nothing like, ‘you can’t do this because of this extra Y or Z.’ I think it comes down to more of like, can we do it with the time we have and at the quality we want to hit?
Like I mentioned, there was a discussion to a point where it’s a concept image of Venomized Sandman. Super cool idea. It’s a really cool image. We were never going to get it done at the quality we wanted to, and it was going to be… it was enough of a challenge to make regular Sandman cool.
And I’m like, ‘okay, now we’re going to do it as a Venomized version?’ This team went above and beyond anything I could have ever expected when we first started this. So I was like, ‘we’re not going to do it.’ So it’s more about that.”
That makes sense on the most basic of levels. Think about it like this. The effects that it would take to make a character like Sandman in an open-world setting and then have that character “interact” with the world as he fought the Spider-Men would be a massive undertaking. Now try and picture adding the Venom symbiote to that and the extra work that would take. Sometimes, simpler is better.
