I'm the opposite of a video game expert, but I did see the Spider-Man video game for PlayStation, and I was amazed at the player's ability to have Spider-Man swing through a surprisingly realistic and accurate Manhattan. The new Spider-Man 2 game, due out in October, will span the East River, allowing the player to take Spider-Man into meticulous a rendered Queens and Brooklyn. Article in The New York Times here.
Replicating parts of the largest city in the United States was also a bigger challenge this time because the process began while many designers at Insomniac, which has offices in Burbank, Calif., and Durham, N.C., were working from their homes during the coronavirus pandemic.
The game's design director, Josue Benavidez, said his research involved contacting organizations like the Center for Brooklyn History, posting on Reddit groups devoted to the borough and calling businesses near the buildings he was studying.
"It's been a lot of living in Google Maps," Benavidez said.
I was surprised to learn that the game developers need to license rights from buildings' owners in order to depict them in the game's landscape.
Depicting a famous city, however, takes more than meticulous renderings. Although the Chrysler Building appears in the 2018 Spider-Man game, it is missing in a 2020 spinoff, Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales, because Insomniac could not reach a copyright agreement with the building's new owners. The studio says the skyscraper will also be absent in October's sequel.
Here is a video preivew peek at Spider-Man 2's gameplay, including a setting in Queens.
