Is Spider-Man PS4 the start of a Marvel Gaming Universe? Bill Rosemann talks up Insomniac's superhero

A 20-year Marvel staffer currently working as Executive Creative Director on Sony’s PS4 exclusive Spider-Man game, Bill Rosemann is such an effusive evangelist for his company and the character you can imagine Stan Lee ringing up him for advice. He’s also not backward in coming forward. “Bill can tell a tale…” says Insomniac Games’ Bryan Intihar affectionately when recalling their first conversation. He’s not wrong.

Executive Creative Director at Marvel in charge of video games - Bill, your job sounds pretty cool...

“Well thank you! When I drive in to work each morning I try to take a moment where I think, oh my gosh! I’m still doing it, I’m still at Marvel, I get to work on characters I love, and now I get to work on video games, and it’s a new era, and we’re working with the best partners. I get to come in and talk about Spider-Man all day. How lucky am I? Very lucky.

“But I feel we, the whole team - us, Marvel games Insomniac, Sony - in making Marvel Spider-Man, we’ve also taken on that great Spider-Man mantra: with great power must come great responsibility. So part of it is, do we all have cool jobs? Yes! Are we working on an amazing game that people would die to make? Yes! Oh my gosh, we’d better not mess up! We’d better make this awesome!”

Wikipedia references over 40 existing Spider-Man games. Why make another one now? Why not Iron Man, or Thor?

“I think the time is right. It was a shift in attitude at Marvel games - let’s be a leader. When you see that red Marvel brick on a game we want it to mean the same thing it does when you see it on a movie poster or on a comic book. You may be like, I don’t know what Black Panther is but it’s a Marvel Studios movie so it’s going to be great and I’m going to go see it. And that agreement means it has to be great. For us that applies to everything Marvel does, whether it’s comics or video games. If that red brick is on it then it’s got to be great. And why Spider-Man? Because we love him. I feel he is not only the greatest Marvel character, I think he’s the greatest superhero from any company - and to me, I think he’s the greatest character in all of fiction.”

Allof fiction?

“In all of fiction. Line them up! I think the thought that was put into him is phenomenal. And people now take him for granted a little bit in that he’s very relatable and he’s very human. But at the time when he was introduced in 1962, that’s not how things were. We always say it was like when The Beatles came to America. It was revolutionary. People had never seen people like [The Beatles] and their attitudes were so refreshing and their music was so amazing, it was like a lightning bolt. And that’s what Spider-Man was. When he was invented his creators got in trouble and they got yelled at, and people said: what are you doing? You have this character who first of all has a full mask over his face like he’s a robber - and that was one of his strengths cos then anyone could imagine themselves under that mask…

Was he the first full masked superhero?

“I think most superheroes before him either had a domino mask or no mask. Usually it was villains who had a full mask. And that added to also in his stories he was hated and  feared. He wasn’t cheered and people didn’t throw parades for hm, they thought he was a bad guy. They also got yelled at cos he had a bug on his chest. Everyone hates bugs! What are you doing? That was probably what made him loveable. He was an outsider. He wasn’t this big barrel chested, square-jawed… he was this skinny, picked on teenager. And so at first the bosses were like, I don’t get it. And then they started seeing sales numbers and the fan mail, and he said, keep doing it!

“So Spider-Man was revolutionary at the time. And I feel ever since his introduction, every superhero that’s been invented has been a reaction to Spider-Man. Are you going to make a character that’s like him or not like him? He’s the one who changed the game, and that’s the kind of characters that people want. He’s not perfect, he fails, he makes mistakes. is origin isn’t the spider bite, it’s that he stepped back and let that burglar run by that killed his Uncle Ben. And then he decided, I’m going to use this costume - that he made to get famous!

“That was another weird thing, he didn’t get powers and say, I’m going to be a superhero! He said, I’m going to make money, and he made a costume. He said, now I’m going to put on this mask cos I’m gonna go get justice. Then he finds the burglar and realises, I let this guy run by. The blood is on my hands. Peter only had two adults who were ever nice to him and one of them is dead because of his inaction, and the other now has to live with this grief.

“But he decides, I’m not going to be a supervillain - because that’s basically the origin of a supervillain right there - he decides every time I pull on this mask I’m going to get redemption. Every single day I’ll pull on this mask and I’ll go out and I’ll make sure someone else doesn’t lose their Uncle Ben.

“So I think for all those reasons - how revolutionary he was, how relatable he is, how complex he is, and how cool he is! - you add all that up, with his great rogues gallery, his cast of characters, I just find him endlessly fascinating and fun. And it’s funny, his popularity has been non-stop since his first appearance. It’s not just one generation that loves him. Each subsequent generation, when you do it right, they all love him.

What does doing it right in a video game look like?

“Number one is: Insomniac and Marvel Games and Sony all aligning on what do we love about him, what makes Spider-Man work, what is the fantasy of being Spider-Man? In this game, what is the fantasy? So you talk about the web-spinning and the swinging and the wall-crawling and treating Manhattan like it’s your urban playground - that’s the Spider-Man fantasy. But then also realising that every great Spider-man story is a Peter Parker story, you can’t separate them.

“Another thing that made him revolutionary, his creators before they did superhero comics, they did teen romance comics. So they were the first ones to smash together the out of the costume romance and drama with superhuman drama. And that you care about Spider-Man because you care about Peter, you care about him going to fight whatever villain because he had just finally got a date with Mary Jane or Gwen Stacy and now he’s got to decide, do I go on my date or do I stand up my date to go and fight this villain? And if I don’t fight this villain, someone’s going to lose their Uncle Ben. So those are the best Spider-Man stories, when those two worlds come smashing together. So that was part of the, how do you make the right game? You align on what makes Spider-man great, what is the Spider-Man fantasy and how do we deliver that through gameplay.”

Insomniac Games speak warmly of the freedom they had to "reimagine and reinvent” characters for the game. How do you see that relationship from Marvel’s perspective?

“What is really awesome about this era of Marvel Games, our mandate is to make the best games. And Marvel respects the different mediums. All of us at Marvel, we grew up loving comics and people not respecting comics. So now that we’re here, we understand a movie is a movie, a comic is a comic, a game is a game. You have to approach each one differently and you can’t trap them and contain them in walls. You have to always respect the brand? Of course. Respect the characters? Of course. But tell your story that is best suited for your medium and your experience.

“I like to look at it as we’re all chefs in a kitchen - Insomniac, us. This Spider-Man game is like an omelette. Now you’ve had an omelette before, there’s something you want from an omelette. But you’ve never had this omelette before. We’ve got all these ingredients that are before us. We get to pick from everything! We get to pick from movies, from cartoons, from comic books - we have all these great ingredients we get to pick what we’re going to use in our Spider-Man omelette so that you say, oh my gosh, as a Spider-Man fan, this is familiar, that’s cool but - woah - I’ve never seen Norman Osborn as mayor of New York City. I’ve never seen Mary Jane as a reporter for the Daily Bugle. This is different. It’s familiar but it’s different. And I’ve got to play the game to see what happens next. So that’s the freedom that we’ve been given. And again, it’s great power and great responsibility. The power is the freedom, the responsibility is we’ve got to get it right.”

You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, of course. Who settles those disputes?

“It comes down to the best idea. And I think on all sides we are very respectful of each other and we are respectful of Spider-Man. And we always talk about you can bend things and stretch things - and yes, to make an omelette you must break some eggs, but in our case we want to bend things but we don’t want to break them. We want to shake things up, we want to have that freedom, but again we want to deliver a game that feels right, that feels authentic. We know our players, they’re smarter than us and they will smell out the false. And they well know when we have done things just to do them. So it comes down to our relationship and respect of what each other had done before. And so we just work very well together. You know, it’s a dance. You want to do this? Well how about this?

How much has this step change in attitudes towards gaming at Marvel been influenced by what your great rivals DC have achieved in the medium with Batman?

“The Marvel Games team kind of reformed about three years ago and that’s when I came over so I can’t really speak of what went on before me. However! All of us are game fans and a lot of us, we know what’s good. And we look at games from everybody, not just our Distinguished Competition. But we do look at other games and we’re all like, yeah, when are we going to do that? But I think that is a natural part of the rest of Marvel itself. Like, let’s do really good TV! Let’s make awesome movies! Now we’re in control, we’re making them. I think Marvel games is just stepping right alongside that. We’re in control, let’s make great games, period.”

Do you have an aspiration for a Marvel Gaming Universe?

“I don’t want to put the cart before the horse. Even in the MCU they started with individual movies.”

Yes, but there was always a bigger picture.

“There was. I mean, they tacked on that Nick Fury scene at the end of Iron Man but did anyone think it would culminate in The Avengers? Or now Avengers Infinity War? That was a pipe dream. The first intention was, let’s just make the best Iron Man movie. We’re approaching it the same way. This is going to be hard enough. Let’s just make the best Spider-Man game. Let’s do that. The rest will take care of itself. Who knows what the future holds? We just want to make sure each individual game is awesome, is great. Again we don’t want to trap people and contain people. We want to give them freedom.”

Something that chimes well in the Marvel Cinematic Universe are the character crossovers. Given the Wakandan embassy and Doctor Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum are in Spider-Man will we see any cameos from those characters too?

“This is Marvel’s New York. This is a Marvel game. It’s not in a bubble. It is the New York that you want Spider-Man in. So yeah, uh, if you’re a Marvel fan coming to play this game you’ll see familiar names and logos and locations and we’re lucky that you’ll see, oh, that is the Sanctum Sanctorum?! It’s not going to be a focus but you’ll be able to swing by it. You’ll feel like, this isn’t just any New York City, I’m in the Marvel universe. This is Marvel’s New York. There will be a lot of elements that will make you feel like it’s part of a larger story.”

Obviously there’s a sizeable Avengers game in the works at Square Enix.

“This is true.”

Will there be any links between that game and this one?

“Again, I don’t want to talk about that now. We just want to focus on Marvel Spider-Man. Um. But I will say... we’re all Marvel fans!”

Finally, what does success look like for this Spider-Man game?

“I want to make the fans happy. I want them to say this is a great Spider-Man game. ‘You’ve really delivered on the fantasy, You’ve taken the best of what came before but you guys have done your own thing.’ We want it to be fun, We want people to have fun with their friends. We want families to get together, we want people to love the experience, we want to introduce new characters to them, we want to remind them of characters they’ve forgotten about but they loved, that’s it. We want to make everyone happy, we want to make the creators proud, we want to make Marvel proud, to say hey, we gave you the shot and you took it and you did it. We want to see fan art, we want to see people dressed as our Spider-Man at conventions. That will be the sign. And that’s our goal - just to make Spider-Man fans happy and for people to say this is an awesome game. If they say it’s the greatest Spider-man game ever then of course that’s what we want! But we want to make Spider-Man fans proud.”