Insomniac Games: Spyro, Ratchet and the Rise of Spider-Man

In 1998 a small California studio put a purple dragon on the original PlayStation, and a partnership that would define a console maker began. Spyro the Dragon was fast, colorful and full of personality, and it announced a studio that cared about how a game felt to move through. Over the next twenty-five years Insomniac Games followed that dragon with the gadget-stuffed Ratchet & Clank, the grim alien war of Resistance, the neon anarchy of Sunset Overdrive, and finally the blockbuster Marvel's Spider-Man, some of the best-selling games PlayStation has ever shipped.

What ties it all together is a sensibility: playful, generous, kinetic, and rarely cynical. Insomniac makes games that are a pleasure to be inside. This is the map of that catalogue, from the platformers to the shooters to the web-slinger.

From mascots to bullets

By the mid-2000s Insomniac had proved it could make one of the best platformer series alive. The question was whether it could make anything else. The answer arrived with the PlayStation 3: Resistance: Fall of Man, a bleak alternate-history war against an alien plague, was a launch title and a statement that the studio could do scale, atmosphere and dread as well as color and comedy. A decade later Sunset Overdrive swung the pendulum all the way back to mayhem, a punk-colored open world about grinding, bouncing and never touching the ground. Same studio, wildly different moods.