Insomniac Games wants a creepy Venom in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2.
And according to Bryan Intihar, senior creative director at the studio, that may come from the team’s fear of living up to the strong characters they’ve made out of Marvel classics Peter Parker and Miles Morales.
It was “one of the things I was avoiding for as long as possible because I was so scared of who we were going to get to do the voice,” Intihar tells Entertainment Weekly [EW] in a recent interview.
Tony Todd was selected for his genuinely terrifying performance in the 2001 thriller Candyman.
Todd’s relationship with the game’s fans has been a little tense up to this point, but Intihar is confident he’s got the right voice to join the already star-studded cast.
In that same EW interview, Intihar says, “Everything we talked about [with] Venom — that sense of strength, that sense of fear, that sense of overwhelming, so different from Peter — Tony embraces that completely in the performance.”
EW also caught up with a couple of other dev team members to get some new info on how darkness works its way into the next game in the series in the way of a famous part of the long-running comic’s lore: The Symbiote.
Intihar offers that the team struggled with how much they want Venom to talk and what mannerisms he will take on to avoid a situation where Venom feels over-written and unrelatable. “For us, Venom is the host plus the Symbiote,” Intihar adds. “You don’t get Venom without both of them being bonded together. What Tony represents is that bond. I think, if anything, casting Tony made us feel more confident in the visual design of the character.”
Senior art director Jacinda Chew states, “The Symbiote is often known as an allegory for the darkness that the host is fighting against. So what makes him an anti-Spider-Man?”
It’s a relationship we’ve seen play out in comic panels, film cells, and video game screens with both Spider-Man and Venom. But it would appear that Insomniacs want to ask questions of their players with this iteration — while scaring the… without using an emo dance montage.
“what happens when that darkness takes over.” It’s not just Peter who’s impacted by the symbiote. “It’s the loved ones and the family around the host who has to see what’s happening to the person that they love,” he adds.
“There’s a lot of juicy drama that we can get from that.” offers Senior Narrative Director Jon Paquette.
“We wanted to try something very different, and I don’t think you can get much more different from Doc Ock than you do Venom,” Intihar explains to EW. “It’s about power. It’s about strength. It’s about being slighted. It’s about Peter being involved much more in the creation of Venom. I think that’s what attracted us.”
We will have much more info tomorrow when Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 will host a Comic-Con panel, which kicks off at 2:30 PM PT/5:30 ET in Hall H for those in town.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 launches on PlayStation 5 on October 20th.
