Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 killed my favorite neighborhood and yours is next

After booting Marvel’s Spider-Man 2Insomniac Games recreated my favourite part of New York City, so I did as any other self-respecting New Yorker: I hurried to the area as quickly as I could. In my case, this meant veering toward South Brooklyn, even as Sandman was wreaking havoc on the infrastructure of Manhattan’s Financial District. However, as I swung beneath the gothic arches of Brooklyn Bridge, the better to glimpse the steel girders and stevedore cranes of Red Hook from a distance, the vista confirmed what I had feared deep down: My favorite neighborhood wasn’t even there.

A similar disappointment had overtaken me back in 2016. As I ripped through the streets, I felt a similar disappointment. Watch Dogs 2,’s San Francisco on a stolen motorcycle, gripping my DualShock 4 in the living room of my house in the Sunset District, my roommates watching with rapt attention as I approached the west side of the peninsula, eagerly awaiting the moment when they could exclaim, “There it is!” But the farmer’s markets, quaint cafés, and intermittent sand dunes of the city’s biggest neighborhood never appeared. Ubisoft crammed it into just nine blocks.

To this day, the arrogance of it offends my sensibilities.

Images: Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment from Polygon

All jokes aside, I get it. In video game terms, the Sunset’s massive grid of blocky houses would be about as compelling a playground as a bad Halo Forge map. Red Hook, once the world’s busiest port but now a languid stretch of New York’s harbor front, is anathema to the excitement of Spidey-swinging around a bustling metropolis — as culturally and culinarily wonderful as the neighborhood is. Including it would also expand the boundary of Insomniac’s map, which is already big enough.

It’s fascinating to me. What are the developers looking for when they create a digital version of a place in real life? What are they cutting? What do they cut? What are they? Watch Dogs: Legion’s London to Grand Theft Auto 5’s Southern California, creative liberties are a necessity. In GTA 4,, Rockstar maintained New York and Hudson County, NJ’s general geography, yes — but it morphed the edges, reshaped neighborhoods, and shifted tectonic plates to make navigation and exploration more compelling. NoClip’s Danny O’Dwyer explored this dissonance at length in a 2016 video essay for GameSpot.

Spider-Man 2’s map is a thrill to traverse as both Peter Parker and Miles Morales, especially with the characters’ new Web Wings that allow them to glide between glass canyons and over the East River into Brooklyn and Queens. I haven’t fast-traveled once in my 15-hour playthrough, and I intend to keep that streak going, so long as the game doesn’t make me do so. In other words, I’ll leave world design to the experts. Maybe Red Hook also appears in Spider-Man 3 anyway.