Insomniac has opened up about the development of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, revealing a huge amount of insight into how it made the record-breaking PlayStation 5 exclusive in a new, spoiler-packed episode of Beyond.
Warning: Spoilers for Spider-Man 2 follow. Read on at your own risk.
In the special episode of Beyond, Insomniac senior creative director Bryan Intihar revealed the developer created a concept for a Venomized Sandman who would appear in Spider-Man 2, but decided against moving forward with the idea in order to keep production within scope.
Spider-Man 2 kicks off with an amazing setpiece that sees both Peter Parker and Miles Morales battle an enormous Sandman across New York. It’s a battle packed with epic moments, fast-moving cutscenes, and, at the end, the subjugation of Sandman himself. Check out the Sandman fight in the video below:
Sandman is then incarcerated, leaving the game’s primary villains, Kraven the Hunter and Venom, to do their thing. But Insomniac explored the possibility of letting the alien symbiote latch on to Sandman himself, if you can imagine such a thing.
“I will tell you… I haven't told anybody this,” Bryan Intihar told IGN, “we did have a Venomized Sandman concept.”
So why ditch the idea? It had nothing to do with a directive from Spider-Man rights holder Marvel, Intihar insisted, rather a production consideration. “It was hard enough to make Sandman,” Intihar said. “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. Maybe one day… I'm probably getting in trouble for saying it, but whatever. It's a really cool image. It's really cool. 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.”
We chatted with Intihar about absolutely everything Spider-Man 2, including an explanation for some of the missing suits, and more. You can watch and listen to the full spoilercast right here, but if you're not ready for spoilers just yet, our wiki guides to Spider-Man 2 and our review of the game have you covered.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.