Marvel's Spider-Man Nearly Didn't Feature Aunt May Because of Her Wrinkles

It turns out that Marvel's Spider-Man, the 2018 action-adventure title from PlayStation and developer Insomniac Games, almost didn't feature the beloved character Aunt May at all. While May ended up eventually appearing in the story, and played a rather major role, one of the writers who worked on Marvel's Spider-Man recently revealed that she was almost left on the cutting room floor simply due to how difficult her wrinkles were to animate. 

According to a new interview from GamesRadar with Dan Slott, who is a longtime Spider-Man comic book writer that assisted with Marvel's Spider-Man, Insomniac initially wanted to include Aunt May only in an off-screen capacity. "They wanted Aunt May to just be a voice on the answering machine or over the phone. In a very early version, they didn't want Aunt May to even be an NPC," Slott said. Explaining more about the reason because of this, Slott explained that older characters that feature wrinkles on their faces are often vastly harder to animate. "They were telling me the reality of it; according to them, old characters - wrinkly characters - to make them look good and realistic, it takes a big amount of work. Equal to what they could use to create five other characters," he said.

Slott went on to say that he was quite "adamant" about needing to include Aunt May in a prominent manner within Marvel's Spider-Man. He even suggested that the game's version of Aunt May could be a little younger in age, similar to Marisa Tomei's iteration of the character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. At the end of the day, Slott's convincing won those over at Insomniac and they ended up putting Aunt May in the game. They also took Slott's advice and made her a bit younger than normal, meaning that less work needed to be done when it came to her facial animations. Considering how integral Aunt May ended up being in Marvel's Spider-Man, it's surely a good decision that was made by those at Insomniac. 

What do you think about a version of Marvel's Spider-Man that didn't feature Aunt May? Let me know your thoughts either down in the comments or shoot me a message on Twitter at @MooreMan12.