Cinema like video games, the universe of Marvel has become colossal today, it is even him who drive the box office in an insolent way, chaining success after success. If Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness has just exceeded 800 million dollars at the box office, on the side of video games, some licenses have also achieved phenomenal figures. We obviously think of Marvel’s Spider-Man, which sold more than 20 million copies on PS4 and which prompted Sony Interactive Entertainment to buy the Insomniac Games studio in 2020 for the sum of 229 million dollars. However, before the game was a global hit and beat the PlayStation flag, Marvel first approached Microsoft to offer them an exclusive partnership. Collaboration that never took place since at the time, the Redmond firm was not interested in Marvel superheroes and preferred to bet on their own licenses and hardware. Obviously, with hindsight, such a decision seems completely absurd and proves that Microsoft made a bad decision.
This very crisp anecdote, we owe it to a Resetera user who shared a few pages of the book The Ultimate History of Video Games Volume 2, released in August 2021, but which provides a better understanding of the issues and strategy of the manufacturers of the time. There is indeed a passage that explains Marvel’s desire to settle in video games in a more qualitative way and to offer strong games. This is why Marvel broke its contract with Activision and approached publishers and studios capable of paying homage to their greatest superheroes. And one of those first characters who was to carry the seal of quality of the new Marvel, it was Spider-Man. Before Sony Interactive Entertainment accepted the challenge, Marvel approached Microsoft, who declined the offer. It was 2014, a time not so long ago, the PS4 and Xbox One were a few months old, but Microsoft had a completely different strategy.
It was Jay Ong, newly appointed head of Marvel’s gaming branch, who had to make sure that Marvel products in video games were as powerful as the films that were released in theaters with the MCU. The idea was indeed to reiterate the feat of the Batman Arkham saga, as recognized for its qualities as for its commercial success. Jay Ong explains in the book that when it took over the Spider-Man video game license rights, Activision wished Marvel “good luck” in “finding the unicorn” who would be able to make better Spider-Man games. Man. The sequel, as we know, Sony Interactive Entertainment has entrusted the development of the game to the Insomniac Games studio which gave birth to Marvel’s Spider-Man, and which is now working on its sequel and the highly anticipated Marvel’s Wolverine.
