Dankzij Sony kunnen we al enkele jaren genieten van enkele fantastische Spider-Man-games. Maar het had helemaal anders kunnen lopen, als Xbox wél potentieel zag in de franchise.
In het boek The Ultimate History of Video Games Volume 2 van Steven L. Kent wordt dieper ingegaan op de periode nadat Marvel in 2014 de licentie van de webslingerende actieheld bij Activison wegnam.
De studio ging aankloppen bij Microsoft en Sony in de hoop dat een van beide partijen de licentie nieuw leven in kon blazen. Tot grote verbazing zag men bij Xbox geen potentie in Spider-Man en bedankte ze Marvel voor het aanbod. Ze hadden vooral plannen om enkel te focussen op hun eigen IP’s en wilden geen extra externe licentie aankopen.
De rest is ondertussen geschiedenis, want Sony nam het aanbod wél aan en zette de toen nog onafhankelijke studio Insomniac op het project.
What he needed was a publishing partner who hadn’t adopted the “crappy licensed games” mentality. He needed a company with an eye for long-term investments, one with a vested interest that would benefit from building a franchise. That partner would need to have a deep pool of talent, commitment to quality, and inexhaustibly deep pockets. There were three companies that fit that description. One of them, Nintendo, mostly developed games based on its own intellectual properties.
Being from console first-party in my past, I pinged both sides, both Xbox and PlayStation, and said, “We don’t have any big console deals with anyone right now. What would you like to do?” Microsoft’s strategy was to focus on their own IP. They passed. I sat down with these two execs from PlayStation third-party, Adam Boyes and John Drake, in August 2014, in a conference room in Burbank. I said, “We have a dream that this is possible, that we could beat Arkham and have one game at least and maybe multiple games that could drive adoption of your platform.”