In furthering Marvel’s ongoing efforts to push Peter Parker out of his own identity, Insomniac Games has confirmed that following the ending of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Miles Morales will now serve as the video game series’ main version of Spider-Man.
As seen at the conclusion of the recently released title, following a fierce, city-wide battle with a King In Black-powered Venom and his symbiote army, Peter ends his latest video game outing by choosing to take a temporary break from his super hero-ing career.
In service of this Spidey Sabbatical and unwilling to leave the city without a Spider-Man, Peter ultimately decides to pass the webs to Miles.
However, when Peter tries to communicate this decision to Miles face-to-face, the unprecedented nature of the situation leaves him tongue-tied and tripping over his words.
Laughing at his mentor’s typical round-about-ness, Miles eventually cuts off Peter mid-stammer and assures him, “I got this.”
“All of it,” he adds, gesturing out towards the Big Apple. “Go be Peter Parker for a while.”
Choking back tears, Peter then fights back tears to ask “Are you sure? It’s a big city”, to which Miles playfully affirms, “I can handle it. As long as I can still call you for advice.”
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“You don’t need it,” Peter confidently counters, his pride in Miles prompting him to wrap him in a brotherly embrace.
“Maybe not now,” digresses Miles, “but there will come a time.”
“I’m here for you,” Peter tells him in turn. “Always.”
Referring to Peter as “Big Bro” and giving one final fist bump to New York’s original web-slinger, Miles ends his time at the Parker household by pulling up the mask on his terrible, terrible, terrible costume and swings off into the sunset.
And it was in discussion of this particular cutscene that the game’s narrative director Ben Arfmann and advanced writer Brittney Morris confirmed that, going forward, Miles Morales would take center stage in Insomniac Games’ future Spider-Man outings.
Asked during a Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 plot-centric interview with io9‘s Justin Carter, “You said earlier you basically knew right away that you wanted playable Venom. Does that also apply to ending this game with Miles as the main’ Spider-Man from now on?”, Morris asserted, “It always felt very natural, and I think we all collectively thought it would happen.”
“To me, it shows a great deal of evolution from Miles; at the beginning of the game, we see him struggling to figure out what he wants to do with his life,” she explained. “By the end, we had Miles carrying the burden of saving the city, and also carrying Pete when Pete wasn’t strong enough to carry himself at various points.”
She further opined, “That’s what’s been so cool about writing a story about two Spider-Men: they’re both strong, and one of them can be strong when the other is not. By the end, Miles is more confident and he’s like, ‘Yeah, I got this. How much worse can things get after what we just went through?'”
Adding to his colleague’s insight, Afrmann noted, “To echo what Brittney said: the idea of a two Spider-Man story was always really essential to this game.”
“I think pretty early on, we knew that we wanted to have that moment of handing the reins over,” said the narrative director. “And as we developed it, as we started to lay down more track leading up to that moment, it just felt more and more right.”
“I think it was Jon who wrote that scene in Aunt May’s garage, and it’s one of my favorite scenes,” he continued. “The way that Miles intuits exactly what Pete is thinking and stops him from stumbling through trying to hand over the mask. Miles going, ‘You know I got this, bro,’ it’s such a great moment between the two of them. And it felt like such a natural conclusion; I’m not sure when specifically we decided to do that, but it always felt like the only way the game could end.”
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 – and Miles’ Adidas-sponsored fashion disaster – is now available exclusively on the PlayStation 5.
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