Analysis: Developers need to realise there’s more to Spider-Man than the films

For comic fans, one of the sweetest moments of E3 2016 was the announcement that a new Spider-Man game was coming, and better still that it was being developed by Insomniac Games, developers of Sunset Overdrive, Ratchet & Clank and the Resistance games.

It was a great reveal trailer too. Spidey moves fluidly and the combat looks to make the most of his agility and grace instead of just punching people in the head repeatedly. In particular, the scene where he charges through a crowded coffee shop shows how much work Insomniac have put into the animations and making Spidey look just like he should.

But while the internet rejoiced at the idea of a good Spider-Man game since Spider-Man 2, I had only one thought cross my mind: “Peter Parker, again?”.

Same old Peter

Peter Parker has been the lead character in all 34 Spider-Man games, and frankly, he’s boring by now. If this new Spider-Man game wants to herald a new crop of Marvel universe games, it’s going to need to give us something more interesting than another serving of Peter Parker’s misplaced angst.

If Marvel comic book games really want to grip the audience again, they’ll need to look back at the comics for inspiration.

For a truly good superhero game, it’s important that there’s a personality beneath the costume. Rocksteady’s Batman series works well because even though you’re only seeing Mr tall, dark, and scowly in his cowl the whole time, you still get the sense that he’s a real person under there, even if that person is all business.

Meanwhile, despite getting the feel of Spider-Man right, and being widely regarded as the best game containing the character, Spider-Man 2’s story was as bland as the film it was based on.

Peter Parker was created in 1962, during an era where Stan Lee would would spit out an archetype, give it an alliterative name and, hey presto, a new superhero appears.

His archetype is “slightly whiny teenager” and every four years or so, when his character gets rebooted, we’re subjected to his lacklustre origin story once more.

Parker wasn’t the only early Marvel superhero without too much else going on. Reed Richards, Scott Summers, Matt Murdoch: all superheroes based on a flat archetype that later found themselves reworked just to be interesting.

You wouldn’t realise it from the films and games, but over the last decade Marvel has quietly been making some pretty significant strides forward in terms of diversity and has given us a bunch of new characters and viewpoints in the process.

A quiet diversity revolution

For the comics giant, it’s obvious that the early characters that propelled it to fame just aren’t cutting it anymore. Now it feels like it’s reinventing itself almost every month with big plot twists, new characters and broken conventions.

If we’re about to get a slew of new superhero games then I’ll be first in line, but rather than giving us back the tired origin stories and characters we’re familiar with, why not play with the new angles that have emerged in the last decade, such as Cyclops’ nigh-fascist mutant revolution, Secret Wars’ Battleworld, or even the incredibly popular Marvel Zombies universe.

Developers should be using Marvel’s masses of history, interesting settings and mountains of characters to build unique stories. Why can’t we get Marvel Zombies horror games or a blood-soaked Punisher first-person-shooter?

Let’s look at some of the big changes from the last few months: Steve Rogers, everyone’s favourite all-American Nazi puncher, has vacated the role of Captain America for Sam Wilson, a superhero from Harlem who trades Steve Roger’s powerset of “I’m a goddamn super soldier” for “can fly and has a telepathic link to birds”.

Wilson is a very different character to Steve Rogers, and so they can use him to tell different stories, but still have that fancy shield on his arm.

Steve Rogers is still around, he was just old for a bit. The problem is that he’s now uttering allegiances to Nazi criminal supergroup HYDRA after an encounter with a sentient cosmic cube changed him from a patriotic grandpa to a young fascist.

It’s one of the biggest shake-ups, unfortunately leading to some of the more entitled fans sending the writer death threats, but imagine a Captain America game where you’re the villain. Prototype and Infamous have both shown us that being a dick with superpowers is incredibly rewarding, but if this was licensed? That’s a chance to offer something unique.

You could also turn pretty much any comic arc featuring Nick Fury into an excellent stealth game; the Mighty Thor’s human form is currently a woman stricken with cancer; and there’s an alternate universe where Gwen Stacy becomes Spider-Woman after she gets bitten by a radioactive spider and beats Peter Parker, who’s a lizard here, to death in their first fight.

Less Peter, more Miles

That last one made me cheer a little. I love Spidey, but I’ve got a healthy dislike for Parker, and the first thing I’d do in a new Spider-Man game is to cut Peter Parker entirely. There’s already a second Spider-Man in the Marvel universe, Miles Morales, and it’s his time to shine.

Peter Parker is vanilla, an orphan with superpowers struggling to balance his social life with his commitment to Justice. Parker’s most difficult choice is whether he wants to date daughter of the city’s police chief Gwen Stacy, or the supermodel Mary Jane Watson.

Contrast that with Miles Morales, the “new” Spider-Man, who took the mantle after Parker’s death in the Ultimate universe and was one of the few characters to be brought over to the main Marvel continuity. Morales was bitten by a different radioactive spider (because comics) and has somewhat similar powers to Parker, although his Spidey-sense is toned down a bit and he can turn invisible.

What’s really interesting about Miles is that he’s much less sure of his place in society. Morales is of dual heritage, and his parents (both still alive) are struggling to make ends meet.

It’s not that he’s a much better character than Parker, it’s that he’s a ‘new’ character. That little change is enough to make a big difference both in terms of the stories you can tell and in gameplay terms for the way you could play it.

How would it change? Morales mostly deals with more street-level threats so he could stomp around Manhattan dealing with hoodlums and gang leaders. He’s also more of an unskilled Spider-Man, meaning you get the chance to play as him as he learns his skills.

Looking beyond the mainstream

If Insomniac go with Morales for another Spidey game, they shouldn’t be afraid to mix in a few different heroes to keep things interesting too – the superhero movies do this so well that even the different studios that have carved up the rights to Marvel’s roster want to play nice with each other to get those crossovers.

My point is that there’s so much more to these characters than their big screen adaptations suggest. There’s a diverse set of characters and themes hailing from different alternate universes with a much more interesting set of stories to tell.

We’ve already had a taste of some of them in 2010’s Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions, but it’s about time some other superheroes received the same treatment.

Unfortunately, it’s too late for Insomniac’s Spider-Man, but for any games coming after it – why not read a few comic books, eh?

Source: techradar.com

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