A pencil used to be one of the most relied-upon parts of a game developer’s toolkit. But thanks to the rise of computer-generated imagery, the humble pencil has certainly become less important over time.
So for this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, we’ll travel back to the days of graph paper and lightboxes, and look at a more modern example of a time when hand-drawn artwork was used in game development.
Insomniac’s Jon Paquette wants the world to know what a game script looks like. Paquette was the head writer on Spider-Man, which was released for the PS4 to near-universal acclaim in 2018. Since then, he’s been hard at work trying to get the game’s script published by meeting regularly with his bosses at Insomniac, Sony, and Marvel.
According to Paquette, there isn’t a lot of publicly-available information on how to develop a game script, and he wanted to pull back the curtain a bit on the process. So after a lot of back-and-forth, the three companies are finally ready to share a written version of the game’s story with fans, and will jointly publish the Spider-Man Script Book later this week:
Go behind the scenes of the smash hit video game sensation with the complete script to Marvel’s Spider-Man… together with a stunning gallery of artwork from the production process! The life of Peter Parker and that of his ever-amazing alter ego are about to collide in major fashion in this all-new take on the world of the wall-crawler, filled with fan-favorite characters… including Mary Jane, Aunt May, Norman Osborn, Otto Octavius and Miles Morales… spun into an unexpected web of drama, spectacle and classic action in the Mighty Marvel Manner!
When Spidey finally removes the Kingpin of Crime from the mean streets of the Big Apple, how will the mysterious Mister Negative’s ascent to power bring Peter’s two worlds crashing together? Learn how the words and the world of a blockbuster hit video game are crafted, and feast your eyes on a wealth of bonus content, via text and art from the team at Insomniac Games and fan-favorite Marvel writers such as Christos Gage!
The 240-page hardcover will include concept art and screenshots paired with text from all the game’s cutscenes. Earlier this week, Paquette shared part of the process with Vice and said that the entire script for Spider-Man runs much closer to 400,000 words and over 2,000 pages):
Insomniac’s take on the popular Marvel character was celebrated not just for how joyous it was to swing around the city of New York, but for telling a damn good Spider-Man story, too. It punted straight past the origin story, starting eight years into superhero-ing, and grounded Peter Parker’s reality with some fresh twists, such as Mary Jane working at the Daily Bugle.
Paquette was not the only writer who contributed to the game, either. It was a group effort involving several other writers, and Paquette actually includes the “designers” as writers, too.
“The other part is writing the [game] experience,” he said. “This is the part that not a lot of people really understand. It’s very collaborative. We work for the designers in this capacity, because the designers come up with the gameplay and we help them structure the experience.”
The Spider-Man Script Book will be available on store shelves on February 11, but you can get an early peak at a few of the interior pages at Marvel.com right now.
The 2010s were an absolutely incredible decade for video games, but as we take our first baby steps into 2020 (and new hardware from Microsoft and Sony sometime this year) some publications are still interested in looking back.
Wired UK understands the futility of trying to rank ten years worth of games, which is why they’ve used “The Best Games of the Decade, Ranked For Your Displeasure” as the title of their retrospective.
But while Wired UK’s contributors were quick to temper expectations, they ultimately made the uncontroversial choice of naming The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild as the best game from 2010 to 2019. Nintendo’s Pokemon Go also landed near the top of the list at #3.
Sony was the only other publisher to place two games on Wired UK’s list, with Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us (#2) and Insomniac’s Spider-Man (#11) both making the cut.
Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2 (#4), Giant Sparrow’s What Remains of Edith Finch (#5), EA Sports’s FIFA 17 (#6), Mojang’s Minecraft (#7), PUBG Corporation’s PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (#8), Lucas Pope’s Return of the Obra Dinn (#9), and From Software’s Dark Souls (#10) made up the rest of Wired UK’s list.
You know, that’s not really a displeasing selection of titles at all.
In this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, we look back at the first time Stan Lee brought his “carnival barker” enthusiasm to video games, as well as a pair of auctions for some very unique artifacts.
With a pocketful of catchphrases, and hiding behind a giant pair of sunglasses, Stan Lee began to resemble a real-life superhero more and more in his later years. Lee’s bombastic speaking style and boundless energy gave his many cameos a zippiness well into his 90s, and it felt like he would always be with us.
Sadly, Lee passed away yesterday at the age of 95.
Along with Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby, Stan Lee redefined the very idea of what a “superhero” was, and their work caused ripples throughout all of pop culture. In this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, we look back at the first time Stan Lee brought his “carnival barker” enthusiasm to video games, as well as a pair of auctions for some very unique artifacts.
