Somewhere under all of the excitement for Insomniac’s Spider-Man game, you might be wondering exactly how such a pairing came to be. Jason Schreier talked to Insomniac CEO Ted Price about this very subject in the Kotaku Splitscreen podcast. If you don’t want to listen to the podcast, the community director at Insomniac, James Stevenson, boiled the matter down pretty simply in a reply on a ResetEra thread.

“Long story short: Sony came to us and asked if we wanted to work with Marvel. Sony and Marvel let us decide what character/universe we wanted to make a game based on. We chose Spider-Man.” Insomniac was essentially given free range to choose where they wanted to focus their energy in the Marvel universe, and they landed on Marvel’s Spider-Man themselves, rather than having it assigned to them.

Knowing that the developer had a conscious choice on which Marvel property they worked with bodes very well for Spider-Man PS4. It’s more likely that they are pouring their full creative energy into the project, rather than being required to do some cheap tie-in for marketing purposes. We already know that Spider-Man PS4 will be a wholly original project, without ties to the Marvel Cinematic Universe or solo Spider-Man movies.

We got a chance to take a closer look at Spider-Man PS4 at E3 last year, and were impressed with what we saw.

What we saw of the game at Sony’s press conference was just a taste of what’s to come. From what was shown during a live playthrough, this might finally be the Spider-Man game to surpass 2004’s Spider-Man 2 in terms of web-slinging traversal and overall fun. Marvel’s Spider-Man is currently swinging towards an early 2018 release date, and rest assured we will have more coverage on the game the closer we get to release.

Saying that a Spider-Man game might surpass Spider-Man 2 is one of the greatest accolades we can lay on Insomniac at this point. Were you surprised to hear that Insomniac chose Spider-Man PS4? If not Spider-Man, what properties would you have liked to see Insomniac Games pick instead?

Spider-Man PS4 is currently listed for a 2018 release date.

[Via: ResetEra]