The Great Web was never to be…
A trailer has leaked online for Spider-Man: The Great Web, a multiplayer game that got some way into development at Insomniac Games before being cancelled.
Insomniac is the company behind 2018’s massively popular Spider-Man PS4 game. It has since released two follow-ups, Miles Morales in 2020 and the brilliant Spider-Man 2 in 2023.
The company was hit by hackers late last year, with a huge amount of confidential detail leaking online, including early information about the upcoming Wolverine game from Insomniac.
If you followed the leaks at the time, you will have already heard that Insomniac has dabbled with an idea for a multiplayer Spider-Man game. The game, as far as we know, is never going to be finished and released.
We opted not to cover the news at the time, but it’s hard to ignore now that the trailer is doing the rounds online and even hugely respected outlets like Forbes have picked up the story.
The Spider-Man multiplayer trailer has been visible on X/Twitter for eight hours with no signs of being taken down. The game, it seems, would have been called Spider-Man: The Great Web. Some of the graphics are far from finished, but it really gives you a flavour of what this game could’ve been.
Featuring a voiceover from Insomniac’s Peter Parker voice actor of choice, the brilliant Yuri Lowenthal, the trailer shows multiple versions of Spider-Man fighting together to protect New York and take on iconic villains like The Sinister Six.
Playable characters seem to include Gwen Stacy, Venom and various versions of Peter Parker and Miles Morales. The combat looks to have the same combos and gadgets blend that players know well from Insomniac’s single-player efforts.
With characters jumping into portals and seeming to visit each other from different dimensions, it seems the game had some shared DNA with the fantastic movies Into the Spider-Verse, Across the Spider-Verse and Beyond the Spider-Verse. (If you’ve played Spider-Man 2 to 100 per cent completion, you’ll know the game does have some connective tissue to the movie multiverse.)
It’s no secret that live-service games, meaning ongoing multiplayer experiences that get updated over a lengthy period with new seasonal content, are a hot topic at the moment.
Marvel’s Avengers game and DC’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League have both already tried to make superhero live-service games happen, with neither seeming to capture a mainstream audience for the longterm.
With both of those games struggling to find success, especially in a space where the biggest winner is a juggernaut like Fortnite, you could argue that Insomniac made a wise choice when the company opted not to move ahead with a multiplayer Spider-Man game.
That being said, we do kind of wish we could play it now… perhaps Disney’s Epic Fortnite deal will eventually scratch a similar itch. Still, we’re very glad to have Insomniac’s stellar single-player games to enjoy — Spider-Man 2 New Game Plus has recently arrived, too!
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