Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales Composer Talks About Balancing Into the Spider-Verse With Their Game

Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales fans may have been expecting a lot of Into the Spider-Verse plot points in the game, but there wasn't a grand amount of overlap. Composer John Paesano talked to io9 about scoring the game and how it differs from the cinematic effort everyone loves. Make no mistake about it, Spider-Verse was a watershed moment for Miles as a character. Comics fans were aware of the young hero, but he took on a bigger stature after the animated film. Still, that one story can't define the Ultimate Spider-Man any more than one of Peter's adventures defines him. So, newer paths and characters were necessary. Yeah, there's the Prowler and his mother, but Miles is taking on a lot of different challenges as a Spider-Man in training. The musical elements and gameplay should reflect those changes.

"Exactly. I didn't want to fully shut the world of Into the Spider-Verse out completely, but our Miles is his own person. Where Spider-Verse was so fantastical, our Miles and his story needed to feel more realistic, and I wanted that to kind of be reflected in the music as well," Paesano said. "The most important thing that I knew was going to be a key element to getting this right was getting people like Boi-1da who were passionate about beat making and producing hip-hop because I didn't want to just be sitting there by myself faking it."

The composer also talked about modernizing the sound of Miles Morales when compared with Spider-Man PS4. He called in some extra help when it came time to craft the soundscape.

"I'm a film composer by trade and grew up, you know, listening to John Williams. Boi-1da was instrumental in making sure that we got this orchestral sound down that incorporated hip hop correctly," Paesano told io9. "He wasn't just making beats, but in a few cases, he was a co-producer in many senses to make sure that everything was playing together. It's funny because when we wrote the score, there's a lot of odd time signatures and syncopated stuff that's not very straightforward, but hip-hop can be so much more direct, musically, and it was so fun to work with him because we both kind of brought each other outside of our comfort zones, which yielded just a really cool mesh of sounds and worlds."

"We're not just being true to this idea we have of the "superhero sound," but also to the complex fabric of Miles' musical tastes that's part of where he comes from," he added. "His father's African American, and his mother's Puerto Rican, and we wanted him to have a wide palette in terms of musical influences because our Miles is young and hip, but he's also this old soul we imagined listening to music that your regular 17-year-old might not necessarily be into."

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