 As part of the recent PlayStation 5 reveal event, Insomniac Games showed off Spider-Man Miles Morales, a new follow-up to the studio's hit game about everyone's favourite wall crawler. While Miles appears as a supporting character in the original game, this time around he's going to take centre stage, becoming the PS5's primary Spider-Man. What's interesting about this is the fact that Insomniac hadn't originally planned to make Miles a big part of their video game's world. Initially, Miles was going to appear as a post-credit tease in Marvel's Spider-Man, as little more than an Easter egg for fans. There were absolutely no plans to make him playable in any form. Miles Morales debuted in the comics in 2011. As an alternate universe version of Spider-Man, fans absolutely loved this new take on the character. So eventually, Marvel's writers came up with an excuse to let Miles travel across dimensional barriers to live in the main comics universe. While he's now probably best known as the star of the Academy award-winning cartoon Into the Spider-Verse, during the development of Marvel's Spider-Man for the PS4, he was still something of a niche character. The team at Insomniac are enormous Spider-Man fans, but they didn't want their game to overwhelm newcomers that didn't know too much about the character's 50-year comic book history. As such, when working on the first draft of the game's script, it was decided that having Miles appear through a dimensional portal, as in the comics, would be a bit much for players. Then creative director Brian Interhaar decided to give Miles another look. He said, I had read the Miles comics over the years, but I went, let me read them again. And I started getting more and more into them. And I said, is there any way we could put him more in there? And we talked a lot about making this a very unique universe, something like the familiar and the fresh. Familiar, but still have it mix things up. Brian went to Bill Roseman, his point of contact with Marvel, and pitched the idea of including Miles in the game's story in a meaningful way. The plan was to keep things simple. Miles didn't come through a portal. There was no Spider-Verse-style dimension hopping. Brian said, what if we have Miles in the world? But it wasn't some kind of dimensional portal he comes through. That he just lives there, you know, he's 15 years old, he's a huge Spider-Man fan. Bill responded, go for it! So the team started building Miles into the story of the game, giving him some dramatic cutscenes. This, though, wasn't enough. Brian was thinking about all the side characters in the game. Yes, this was a Spider-Man game, but it was also about his friends. According to Brian, what we really wanted to do was show a superhero world from all different angles. What is it like to be in that world and not have superpowers? Just a different perspective of the world. If you have a character playable, you can have a much more fulfilling arc for that character. So Brian went to his team with a suggestion. What if, as well as playing as Spider-Man, the game also let you play as Peter Parker? Everyone agreed that yes, that made sense, sure. Then Brian pushed further. Wouldn't Mary Jane's arc be more satisfying if she was playable as well as part of her investigations? Yes, the team admitted. That was possible. Finally, Brian pushed again. What about making Miles playable too? To their credit, the team really worked together to make Miles's gameplay sections as interesting as possible. According to Brian, that Miles mission at City Hall, that really came together because the designer really got into the narrative and got into the experience and said, here's how I would make this feel emotional for him. And then it was the lighting and the environment people. We really invested a lot of time and effort into those scenes. Together, the team at Insomniac fleshed out Miles' role to make him an interesting, engaging character with his own arc in the story. After that, it made perfect sense to continue the story of Spider-Man by giving Miles a real chance to shine. The moral of the story is that it's nice to get a fresh perspective sometimes. Because the team at Insomniac wanted to feature a diverse range of characters in the original Marvel Spider-Man game, players now have the chance to enjoy a fresh take on a familiar superhero.