Spider-Man PS4: What Does The Ending Really Mean?

4. Gearing Up For The Goblin

Insomniac Games

In the run up to Spider-Man releasing, fans were endlessly debating the role Norman Osborn would come to play in the story. The studio had chosen to reimagine Peter Parker's most notorious adversary as the Mayor of New York City, and with a glider nowhere to be seen, it soon became apparent that Norman was yet to suit up in his infamous green and purple garb.

Despite this, the Osborn of Insomniac's Marvel mythos is every bit as smarmy and repugnant as his comics counterpart. He's a shrewd political operator, ruthless as he is duplicitous, and though it looked likely by the third act that Insomniac would ignore his villainous ways, they teased something particularly important late on.

When MJ infiltrates Osborn's penthouse apartment - a devastating level where the player learns why Harry's been missing and why Martin Li has it in for Osborn - she comes across a set of spherical objects in its secret lab. They're purple, and she questions their purpose, but to the trained eye they can only mean one thing: pumpkin bombs.

Having survived his encounter with Doc Ock only to resign as the Devil's Breath controversy consumed his mayorship, the stage has been well and truly set for Norman to become the Goblin in the sequel. And that's without even mentioning those post-credits sequences...

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.