Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is out on October 20, and for the sequel, developer Insomniac Games has added what could be the best spider-feature possible: memes. Specifically, the Spider-Man pointing meme that works well in a game featuring two arachnid-themed heroes keeping New York City safe. Spotted by Culture Crave, you can get the spider-fingers in pointing mode when you run into your superhero counterpart while out on patrol. The fingers! They point!
#SpiderMan2 let’s you do the pointing meme when you comes across the other Spidey 🫵 🕸️ pic.twitter.com/pMh03L7dU9
— Culture Crave 🍿 (@CultureCrave) October 17, 2023
In case you’ve ever wondered, the Spider-Man pointing at Spider-Man meme has roots in an episode of the 1967 Spider-Man TV series in which the villain of the week impersonates Spider-Man and the two eventually cross paths. Fingers are pointed, chaos temporarily ensues, and Peter Parker lives to fight another day in a world where a newspaper publisher can wage a personal war against him without fear of being sued for libel.
That screenshot of pointing Spider-Men would eventually begin circulating around message boards in the early 2010s, peaking in popularity around the mid-2010s. Officially, the meme has been replicated a few times in Spider-Man films. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse riffed on the meme in an end credits sequence, while the live-action Spider-Man: No Way Home movie tripled down on the joke with all three of its heroes. Nothing beats Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse when it comes to sheer quantity, as that film expands the meme to multiversal levels of pointing Spider-people.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is a big hit with critics right now, and currently, the game has an impressive metascore of 91 from 128 reviews.
“All in all, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 may largely give us more of what we’ve played in Insomniac’s previous Spider-Man games, but that winning formula is still so damn fun that it really doesn’t matter,” Jordan Ramée wrote in GameSpot’s Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 review. “The story’s exploration of loneliness is fantastic, creating gripping new narratives for the two heroes, Peter and Miles, as well as the two main villains, Kraven and Venom. Spider-Man 2 unites all four characters in a riveting narrative throughline you’ll want to see all the way through and has the gameplay hooks to keep you engaged the whole ride.”
