Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is the latest in a long line of top-tier story-driven games from Sony’s PlayStation Studios. Yes, it may take place in a sprawling New York City, but for all intents and purposes Insomniac’s latest is a focused narrative campaign that happens to take place in an open world. It’s in this tale of two Spideys that the sequel really shines, too, and highlights just how reliable Sony has become when it comes to delivering single-player games that thrill as much as they move us.
The storytelling formula concocted in Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune can still be seen as the building blocks for every hit PlayStation story-driven game since. The key was not only delivering high-octane action and explosive moments that stick in the memory, but developing characters that made these life-or-death moments mean so much more. We care about Nathan, Sully, and Elena in a way that very few video game characters had made us up until this point. No longer would these heroes be known as PlayStation mascots, but characters instead. Out went Crash, Jak, and other wordless protagonists, and in came fully scripted humans with a newfound complexity.
These characters would go on to define what PlayStation studio games would look like throughout the PS3 and PS4 generations, so much so their faces make up the logo shown every time you loaded up a PlayStation exclusive over the past few years. This change in mindset also went hand-in-hand with another technological breakthrough – the vastly improved motion capture and facial animation tech, that enabled what was written down on the page to be conveyed better than ever before. It allowed for this modern era of first-party studios to create deeper characters, exemplified perfectly by the nuanced re-imagining of Kratos in the latest God of War games.
It also allowed for the micro to be as important as the macro, finding those personal moments that really bring the bigger picture to life. Storytelling risks are still taken with unexpected twists taken and new wild worlds created, but these days it seems emotional ties to characters and relationships within their worlds are the core pillar of Sony’s storytelling playbook. The end of the world beckons in God of War Ragnarok, but that backdrop is secondary to the bond between a father and son. The end of the world has already taken place in The Last of Us, but it's Joel and Ellie’s relationship that lives on. In Ghost of Tsushima, an invading force threatens a nation but it's our hero’s personal demons that loom largest.
Emotional ties to characters and relationships within their worlds are the core pillar of Sony’s storytelling playbook.
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And now, in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, that pattern continues. New York is under threat from a new breed of supervillain, but it's Peter and Miles’ personal journeys that take centre stage. It’s these very human issues of grief, strained relationships, and self-worth that drive Insomniac’s sequel to new storytelling heights. Where many other Spider-Man projects are focused on the multiverse of it all, Spider-Man 2’s risk is in its restraint – drilling into what we love about these characters from the comic book pages and reimagining them in ways that fit into the modern video game storytelling formula.
This formula can be traced all the way back to the original PlayStation. Back in the 90s, when Sony’s first console was looking for games to construct its groundbreaking library, it wasn’t afraid to experiment. It may be funny to say now, but adding a fully fleshed-out narrative, complete with complex characters and plot beats aimed not just at children, was relatively experimental for the time. Risks were taken – the original Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil, and Silent Hill were PlayStation exclusives that explored mature themes and challenged the player to stay engaged not only through gameplay but story as well. MGS quite literally employed techniques never seen in a video game before in pursuit of its storytelling ambitions.
The PlayStation 2 – and Metal Gear Solid 2 – was even more experimental, Hideo Kojima’s sequel famously flipping the script in many memorable twists, including even who you’re controlling. This new post-millennium era enabled Sony to tell bigger and better stories, largely down to the technology it had available to it, as former Chairman of SIE Worldwide Studios Shawn Layden explained to us in an interview earlier this year:
“Whether you go from CD to DVD, to Blu-ray, to extended Blu-ray, what you're doing is, you're making just a bigger palette to paint on,” he said. “And more painting is more time, more time is more money. But more painting is also richer, more involved storylines. You could actually have a narrative. [...] And it was a huge step change from whatever action-adventure tropes had been prevalent at the time.
“You can tell a more nuanced story”, Layden continued. “And I think that was [what] PS2 brought to the gaming market, the inception of that hugely narrative-based gaming. To try to make a Guy Ritchie movie into a game was something no one had seen before.”
Movies would come to influence PlayStation’s games more and more. This was nowhere more apparent than in the game that ushered Sony’s first-party studios into the modern era of cinematic storytelling we find ourselves in now – Uncharted. Indiana Jones had long proved an influence on PlayStation action adventures. Despite originally launching on the Sega Saturn, Tomb Raider became synonymous with the PlayStation but was limited by the technology at the time. In the high-definition age, Naughty Dog took the essence of Lara Croft’s expeditions and married them with the high production values more associated with action cinema.
Spider-Man 2 on PlayStation 2 has long been a fan-favourite, but it was shackled to the movie’s plot and had the technical limitations of the time, so could never dream of reaching the highs soared to in Insomniac’s adventure. Almost two decades later, rather than tying games directly into movies, Sony looks to them for inspiration. Spider-Man 2 in 2023 has the MCU’s quippy dialogue and the heart of the Spider-Verse films, and combines it with the depth of character we’ve become accustomed to from PlayStation studios over the past 30 years. It’s the latest in a long line of fantastic story-driven Sony exclusives, and one that excites as much as it aims to affect us emotionally, in turn attempting to elevate it over the medium it once looked up to. This is the modern power of PlayStation.
Simon Cardy is ready to get emotionally devastated by PlayStation for another decade. Follow him on Twitter at @CardySimon.
