How Insomniac Games tried to make a Spider-Man suit for every kind of player

theverge.com:

By Andrew Webster, an entertainment editor covering streaming, virtual worlds, and every single Pokémon video game. Andrew joined The Verge in 2012, writing over 4,000 stories.

For the art team at Insomniac Games, there’s one job that everyone seems to want: working on Spidey’s suits. Since the first Spider-Man game on the PS4, modeling the in-game suits has been “a hotly contested assignment” among the studio’s character team, according to senior art director Jacinda Chew. Over the course of three games, including the recently launched Spider-Man 2, the team has managed to add a huge number of unlockable suits, covering everything from the Across the Spider-Verse animated film to the internet’s favorite bodega cat. “That’s the treat,” says Chew, “to be able to work on a suit.”

However, that wasn’t something that was obvious to her from the start. Chew says that it wasn’t until the first Spider-Man launched and players started posting photos of their favorite suits that she realized just how important the different versions of Spidey could be to people. “Some people grew up reading a certain comic or watching a certain movie, and now they’re saying, ‘That is my Spider-Man,’” she explains. “That’s the thing that I started to realize, how loyal fans are to that one Spider-Man that defined their childhood or a moment in their life. Because of that, we try to be very respectful about reproducing those suits in the game.”

(She was particularly surprised by the response to Spider-Cat: “Man, people loved that cat. And obviously, we brought it back. Hopefully there will be more cats in the future.”)

Spider-Man 2 features a number of returning suits, along with some brand-new ones. It also covers two different characters, as both