Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 Director Recalls “Heated” Moment With PlayStation During Game’s Development

Marvel’s Spider-Man 2‘s final act was apparently a point of contention between Insomniac Games and PlayStation. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 was one of the biggest games to release in 2023 and was a commercial and critical smash hit. The game set records and became PlayStation’s fastest selling exclusive, even making its way into the top 5 best selling games of the year so far. It’s hard to imagine a Spider-Man game not dominating in the year 2023 when the character’s last two live action outings both grossed over $1 billion and the character is arguably at the peak of his relevancy with animated films, games, live action movies, comics, and more. Nevertheless, making a Spider-Man story isn’t easy itself.

Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 was in the works for nearly five years and while it turned out well, there were some criticisms regarding the story. While not a bad story, some fans noted that the game felt a bit rushed and was trying to tackle too much without giving it all the time needed to breathe, particularly in the third act of the game. Well, it turns out that wasn’t really on purpose, probably. In a recent episode of the Game Makers Notebook podcast (hosted by Insomniac Games boss Ted Price), Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 director Bryan Intihar recalled a “heated” moment during the game’s development. Intihar noted that Insomniac Games realized in the middle of development, the team realized that they weren’t going to hit the level of quality they were striving for with the second half of the game’s story. The team had a moment that he described as “heated”, but not argumentative conversation with producers from Sony where they noted that the team wouldn’t be able to feasibly accomplish the things they wanted to achieve. Intihar had an emotional reaction and then proceeded to write down how they could cut a bunch of content, but retain the bones necessary to tell the story they wanted to tell.

We’re not exactly sure why Insomniac Games wouldn’t be able to achieve what they wanted to, since they’re certainly talented. It’s possible it would’ve required too much extra time or money to pull off, but Insomniac Games was still able to achieve a successful conclusion to its Spider-Man game. It was confirmed a while back that Miles Morales was meant to have the symbiote at one point and Tony Todd reported that only 10% of his recorded dialogue was used for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, so a lot of things probably got scaled back.