Enter Sandman.
If you haven’t heard yet, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is coming to PC/Steam in January. Many have been looking forward to it, as the game has been locked on PlayStation for some time, and many do not have the platform. Anyway, there were many elements to the story that needed to be covered, but within the PlayStation Blog announcement about the game came a key piece of insight into how the game opened. Specifically, the fight featured both Peter Parker and Miles Morales going up against Sandman, which many praised as one of the best moments in the entire game.
Senior Creative Director Bryan Intihar spoke about how the team knew that the PS5 would be the console the game would be made for, and they decided to go big due to that:
“Sandman was one of the first things we decided upon, like really early on. This was a meeting where I was like: ‘I want to open with Sandman’. We knew very early on [Marvel’s Spider-Man 2] was going to be on the PS5 console. We knew enough about the console, its capabilities and how we wanted to push it. And we obviously knew it was going to be two Spider-Men. So, you say: new console. Big sequel. Two heroes. What is deserving of an opening for that? I think Sandman was our thing.”
As you can imagine, even with them knowing exactly how they wanted to do the game’s opening, they had a bit of a struggle to pull it off:
“We worked on that mission for a long time. A long, long, long time. Here’s the thing: it’s not just like, obviously, he’s a big character in the opening. But technically it’s a challenge, whether it’s moving in and out of buildings and seamlessly switching heroes, just the amount of tech and art that goes into making Sandman look good.”
That’s a fair point, as he’s a character that, by definition, doesn’t have a “solid form” when he’s not looking human. That means you have to account for basically every spec of sand he creates. That’s a challenge. Plus, the creative director knew that this fight would be the way to showcase how this was Peter and Miles’ game together, so the fight had to convey that.
Ironically, more people talk about the Sandman fight than what happens with Venom, which is sad because that was the character hyped up since the title’s reveal trailer in 2021. Plus, as the reveal noted, there is no DLC for the sequel, so it’ll be curious to see what happens next.