How PS5’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales will expand Marvel’s video game multi-verse plans

One of the biggest games that’ll welcome players to the PlayStation 5 era this holiday season is Insomniac’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and despite its comparatively brief length, Miles' story is one the studio — with Marvel’s blessing — has been looking forward to sharing since 2018, when Spider-Man spun Sony a breakout superhero hit for the PS4.

Framing Miles’ solo adventure as the next step in Marvel’s new but growing modern-day gaming multiverse, Insomniac’s Bryan Intihar recently told Entertainment Weekly that Peter Parker’s Harlem counterpart was built from the start into the studio’s long-term plans for expanding Spidey’s video game stories. 

Fans who saw the mid-credits scene at the end of Spidey’s PS4 game might have guessed that Miles would figure into Marvel’s long-term gaming plans — and they’d have been right. “One of the reasons we put that out was to hopefully convince people that ‘He’s a Spider-Man now. Can we have a game with him?’” explained Intihar, after confessing the team “knew really early that [Spider-Man] was going to end with him getting the spider bite.”

That scene featured Miles revealing his strange new supernatural powers to Peter (and Peter revealing his Spidey identity to Miles) — all in a one-on-one moment that metaphorically ripped the masks off two playable characters at once. It laid the groundwork for what players will experience with Miles Morales on PS5, and, according to Marvel Games’ Bill Rosemann, fits in with Marvel’s different approach to tackling multiple Spider-Man storylines across video games than the one Marvel Entertainment takes on the big screen with the MCU.

“Each game is in the Marvel universe, but they're in their own reality, if you will," Rosemann told EW. “Currently, our plan is to keep each game set in its own Marvel universe.” Along with Peter and Miles, there’s a completely separate, classic comics era-inspired Spidey also bound for the upcoming Marvel’s Avengers game as a post-launch DLC character — adding up to no fewer than three versions of Spider-Man running around at once on game consoles. 

In effect, that makes Spider-Man part of an interconnected Marvel gaming multi-verse, rather than a single character threading through a MCU-style arc that stays consistent over multiple new releases. And in a way, that follows the spirit built into Sony’s own animated Spider-Verse movie franchise, which unites its characters not by story beats, but by celebrating all the versions of Spider-Man that Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s iconic creation has spawned over its six-decade comics run.

Rosemann wouldn’t confirm whether a full sequel to 2018’s Spider-Man is in the works as a follow-up to Miles Morales, slyly teasing that players should (as Lee would say) “Stay Tuned, True Believers!” But the first game went on to become one of the PS4’s most successful exclusives (and the top-selling superhero game of all time), so it’s tough to imagine a Spider-Verse where more web-slinging goodness isn’t headed our way. Like the PS5 itself, Spider-Man: Miles Morales hasn’t yet been given a firm release date, but it’s expected to arrive around the time the new console launches later this year.