If the (adamantium) bones are good, the rest don’t matter

A little bit different from today: An interview with the senior project director of Insomniac Games’ upcoming Marvel’s Wolverine game about adapting a 50 year old character for a fresh take in a new medium.

With the Arkham series from Rocksteady well and truly wrapped up, Insomniac appears to have taken the mantle of delivering the ideal superhero experience. The initial Spider-Man game was arguably the best game at the time to put a player into the suit, only to to be improved on once again with Spider-Man 2. Marvel’s Wolverine (shortened to Wolverine hereafter ‘cause we know where he comes from) brings high expectations not just because Logan is so beloved but because he’s so distinct.

To use Shakespearean parlance, Logan is the Macbeth to Peter Parker’s Hamlet. He’s older, he’s bloodier, he’s more brutal. It’s not necessarily that he’s more complex, it’s that the complexity sits underneath a different, hardened exterior. There are also certain things that any adapter has to get right – Wolverine has to have an adamantium skeleton, he’s gotta have claws, he’s got to have a mutant healing factor. Other certain canonical things can get displaced by adaptation, see the famously tall and slightly infamously Australian Hugh Jackman playing the once famously diminutive Canadian.

Wolverine has had lots of variations in his story – the Hugh Jackman iteration alone crosses universes and timelines – and the team set out not to make an origin story. “The origin story’s been done. When we start this game, he already has his adamantium skeleton,” says senior project director Jess Reiner-Reid from Insomniac Games, who has worked for Playstation Studios for over 15 years on multiple franchises including Marvel’s Spider-Man and God of War. “He doesn’t remember how he got it, but he has it. So he’s already established in that way.”

“But there’s non-negotiables,” she adds. “We knew we had to get claw combat right. That’s number one. It has to feel like you are playing as Logan with claws. Then we also wanted to make sure we got his mutant powers right, because people think about Logan and his healing factor. Those are pretty synonymous.”

The other important thing to get right in adapting the character is not just the canonical non-negotiables, but the actual feeling. Think of Rocksteady’s Batman, who can throw a punch but also has to largely operate in the shadows because while he’s an uber-wealthy, ultra-equipped man, there are no superpowers there. Then think of the best parts of Insomniac's Spider-Man, swinging across the boroughs of New York city.

Developers have the job of turning a previous passive, or receptive, experience into an active one. You don’t want to watch Wolverine doing cool things, you want to be Wolverine doing cool things. “There have been other Wolverine games, but it’s been a few years. It’s definitely the first time we get to have him have his own adventure on the Playstation 5,” says Reiner-Reed, the senior project director at Insomniac Games. The entire time the team were approaching the game, they were looking at telling a “unique Logan experience”.

“We want you to have that player experience of feeling the ultimately Wolverine fantasy. So constantly in meetings we’re talking about feeling like you have the claws. What would you expect to happen when you swipe at a wall? You want to feel it in the controller, you want to hear it, and you want to see the claw slashes.”

Finally, there’s the tone. Although the character has taken the spotlight in the X-Men films and various comic series over the time, the X-Men collection of characters (to refer broadly to the mutant umbrella of the Marvel universe in the comics and films, because notably the X-Men do not exist in this particular universe) are a massive ensemble. Everybody fills their role, and there’s a tonal variety that you get in any ensemble across any storytelling medium. This variance of tone is part of why these stories are so successful; they reflect the myriad of humans that you encounter in your everyday life, albeit with more people who can conjure things with their mind. 

Therefore, if you take the surly, violent, part of that ensemble and showcase him on his own, and suddenly you’re dealing with a different challenge. Logan is not Spider-Man, Reiner-Reed explains. “You think of Peter Parker, he’s a little more light-hearted with more quips. That’s not Logan. Logan’s darker and grumpier. He says a lot with his facial expressions, but not a lot outwardly.”

“There’s a lot of feelings and a lot of emotions behind his decisions. He isn’t trying to be a hero in the limelight. He isn’t a friendly superhero that’s getting high fives on the street. He’s living in a much more brutal world.”

Reiner-Reed was clearly excited about the level of emotional depth that the team could plumb out of this character. “Speaking for myself, coming into working on Wolverine, I’m glad we didn’t go down a route where we made a purely just ‘I’m a guy with claws and I kill things’ and that’s the A to Z story.”

She believes that one of the surprising aspects of the character that people are going to be surprised about is Logan’s sense of humour: drier than Peter Parker, but still very much there. “Yes, he has the darker, grumpier side that he’s dealing with, but there’s actually a warm heart there. He is trying to do the right thing. He’s not somebody who is glorifying violence. He has claws, so there’s killing, there’s violence and blood, but there’s a lot of reason behind what he’s doing. He really is trying to help and defend mutants. So he’s defending those who can’t defend themselves.”

“I hope people – when they play – they do get to realise that Logan is not a one dimensional character. He has a lot of dimensions that we’re trying to build up through the game.”

When it comes to adapting the character – however far they stray and what they choose to keep the same – there’s a level of trust between Insomniac and Marvel, built up from working on the Spider-Man games. “They know we’re going to have a lot of respect and take care of the characters that they’ve built,” she says,. “But they’re very open to us to collaborate with us and come up with some ideas – what if Deathstrike was leading The Hand, what if Mystique and Tiger Tiger are in a relationship? There’s definitely parts where we work with Marvel to stay true to the most iconic parts of characters but also adjust a bit because it’s what we were able to do with Spider-Man and they gave us that kind of trust and collaboration with Wolverine.”

“Everything is rooted in what’s authentic to Wolverine.”

Marvel’s Wolverine releases on September 15 for Playstation 5.