Presentation
A purple dragon.
A Lombax accompanied by a small robot.
An alien invasion.
An apocalypse transformed into a playground.
Then Spider-Man swinging across Manhattan at the end of a web.
On paper, Spyro, Ratchet & Clank, Resistance, Sunset Overdrive and Marvel’s Spider-Man do not seem to have much in common.
And yet, when placed back into the history of Insomniac Games, something begins to emerge.
The setting changes.
The hero changes.
Sometimes even the console changes.
But the studio constantly returns to a few very concrete obsessions: keep the player moving, give them entertaining tools to use, and build worlds expressive enough for the action to immediately have a personality of its own.
Insomniac Games was founded in 1994 by Ted Price. Its first game, Disruptor, came before Spyro the Dragon in 1998, followed by Ratchet & Clank in 2002 and Resistance: Fall of Man in 2006. Those three later series gradually established the studio as one of PlayStation’s most regular partners.
That relationship would last for more than twenty years without preventing Insomniac from remaining independent or working elsewhere.
In 2014, the studio developed Sunset Overdrive for Xbox One: an open world where simply running almost feels like bad manners when you can grind rails, bounce off cars and cross the city by treating its scenery like one enormous skatepark.
Then came Marvel’s Spider-Man.
And suddenly, all those years spent thinking about movement seemed to find a superhero particularly well suited to them.
In 2019, after more than two decades of collaboration, Sony Interactive Entertainment finally acquired Insomniac Games and brought it into its family of studios.
Insomniac officially became a PlayStation studio.
In a way, it had already felt like one for quite some time.
History
1994: starting with guns
Insomniac Games was founded in 1994 by Ted Price, who would lead the studio for more than thirty years.
Its first project was Disruptor, a science-fiction first-person shooter released for the original PlayStation.
That detail is interesting when Insomniac is now mostly associated with colorful characters.
The studio did not begin with a mascot.
It began with weapons.
And that fascination with improbable arsenals never really disappeared.
After Disruptor, however, the team went looking for something very different.
Something brighter.
More accessible.
More alive.
Spyro: learning to love space
In 1998, Spyro the Dragon arrived on PlayStation.
Ted Price would later explain that after Disruptor, the team was searching for its next project when producer Mark Cerny noticed a lack of family-friendly games on the console. The idea of building a game around a dragon then emerged inside the studio.
Spyro represented a dramatic break.
The enclosed military world of Disruptor gave way to large, colorful spaces that the small dragon could cross by running, charging and, above all, gliding.
Movement was already becoming more than a way to reach the next objective.
It became part of the pleasure.
Climbing onto a platform might reveal somewhere inaccessible.
Finding the right starting point could make it possible to glide there.
Exploration emerged directly from the character’s abilities.
Insomniac would develop the first three Spyro games before leaving the series behind.
First major success.
First mascot.
And already, the first farewell.
Ratchet & Clank: movement meets the arsenal
In 2002, Insomniac launched Ratchet & Clank on PlayStation 2.
This time, several pieces of its identity began to come together.
Platforming.
Exploration.
Humor.
Bright extraterrestrial worlds.
And most importantly, weapons.
Lots of weapons.
The series became famous for its deliberately excessive gadgets and arsenals: the goal was not simply to give players a gun more powerful than the previous one, but to give them new toys.
One weapon might transform enemies.
Another could suck them in.
Another might completely change the way a fight has to be handled.
That philosophy would follow Ratchet and Clank across several generations of PlayStation. The series, which began in 2002, would pass the twenty-year mark and evolve alongside the hardware all the way to Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart on PlayStation 5.
Resistance: changing tone again
At the launch of PlayStation 3 in 2006, Insomniac radically changed tone again with Resistance: Fall of Man.
Ratchet’s colors disappeared.
In their place came an alternate history, a devastated Europe and the invasion of the Chimera.
Resistance became one of the notable franchises of the early PlayStation 3 era and would produce several installments.
But even inside this much darker universe, Insomniac remained Insomniac.
The weapons still refused to become ordinary.
The studio continued looking for that small mechanical idea capable of turning a combat tool into something you wanted to try simply to see what it would do.
Spyro let the player play with movement.
Ratchet played with weapons.
Resistance showed that Insomniac could preserve some of those instincts while completely changing its audience and atmosphere.
Growing beyond a single team
By the end of the 2000s, Insomniac was also expanding geographically.
In 2008, the studio announced a second location in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina, intended to work both on existing properties and new franchises.
That expansion accompanied a broader shift.
Insomniac gradually began exploring projects that did not necessarily pass through PlayStation.
And one of them would become perhaps the clearest demonstration of what the studio likes to do when given complete freedom.
Sunset Overdrive: whatever you do, do not touch the ground
In 2014, Sunset Overdrive launched on Xbox One.
The collaboration might seem unusual for a studio so closely associated with PlayStation.
The game itself, much less so.
Its open world is built around speed and mobility. Rails, walls, cars, cables and buildings all become surfaces that allow the player to cross Sunset City without slowing down. The traversal system that became central to the final game was not even at the heart of the original concept: it emerged gradually during development when the team began experimenting with grinding across environmental objects.
The result almost feels like a statement of intent.
An open world does not necessarily have to be somewhere you move through.
It can be a toy you use in order to move.
And looking at what Insomniac would later do with Spider-Man makes it easy to understand why this experiment mattered.
Spider-Man: twenty years of movement find their hero
In 2018, Insomniac released Marvel’s Spider-Man on PlayStation 4 in collaboration with Sony Interactive Entertainment and Marvel Games.
The project looked new.
Its DNA was much less so.
Spyro had taught the studio to build spaces that were enjoyable to move through.
Ratchet & Clank had developed its taste for gadgets and mobility.
Sunset Overdrive had transformed an entire city into a traversal playground.
Spider-Man brought those instincts together almost naturally.
Manhattan did not simply need to feel believable.
Players needed to want to cross it.
A large part of the pleasure therefore comes from an almost brutally simple idea: getting from point A to point B should already be fun.
Swing.
Gain height.
Dive.
Catch another web.
Skim the ground.
Launch again.
The open world stops being the distance between two missions.
It becomes a mechanic in itself.
The game’s success once again changed Insomniac’s scale. By the time Sony announced its acquisition of the studio in August 2019, Marvel’s Spider-Man had already sold more than 13.2 million copies worldwide.
2019: independence joins PlayStation
The move almost seems inevitable given how closely the histories of the two companies had become intertwined.
But it happened late.
Insomniac had collaborated with Sony for more than twenty years while remaining independent, maintaining its own structure and even developing Sunset Overdrive for Xbox One.
In 2019, Sony Interactive Entertainment announced and completed its acquisition of Insomniac Games.
The studio officially joined what would become PlayStation Studios.
That new situation did not prevent it from increasing its production output.
Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales accompanied the launch of PlayStation 5.
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart brought back the historic duo.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 continued its Marvel universe.
And several of those productions also reached PC with assistance from Nixxes Software.
After Ted Price
For three decades, Insomniac’s history was difficult to separate from that of its founder.
That era ended in 2025.
Ted Price announced his retirement after more than thirty years at the head of the studio. Leadership was then handed to three co-heads: Chad Dezern, Jen Huang and Ryan Schneider.
The choice is revealing.
Rather than replace one historic figure with another single personality, Insomniac divided leadership between three people coming from different areas: creative development, strategy and operations.
The studio said it wanted to preserve its culture of collaboration and transparency while continuing to evolve.
After thirty years, Insomniac changed again.
This time, it was not changing heroes.
It was changing generations.
What sets it apart
Movement before destination
There are probably studios where running from one side of a map to another is simply a necessity.
At Insomniac, it regularly becomes a mechanic in its own right.
Spyro glides.
Ratchet jumps, slides and uses gadgets.
Sunset Overdrive practically asks the player to treat the ground as a forbidden zone.
Spider-Man turns streets and buildings into lines of movement.
Even when the systems have very little in common, one idea persists:
The journey itself should make you want to play.
That taste for movement partly explains why Insomniac’s games often feel so immediate.
Sometimes, you can understand their personality simply by moving the character around for thirty seconds.
Weapons that are also toys
The studio’s other long-standing obsession lies in its arsenals.
Insomniac obviously knows how to design effective weapons.
But those are rarely the most interesting ones.
The best are the weapons that make you want to pull the trigger simply to discover what they will do.
That philosophy is especially visible in Ratchet & Clank, where weapons and gadgets directly contribute to the humor and identity of the series. It also appears in Resistance and in the exuberance of Sunset Overdrive.
A weapon is therefore not simply a statistic.
It can become a small game design idea in its own right.
A behavior.
A joke.
An experiment.
A completely different problem to solve.
Changing heroes without completely changing temperament
Spyro is a dragon.
Ratchet is a mechanic Lombax.
Nathan Hale fights an alien invasion.
Spider-Man crosses New York.
Wolverine seems destined to solve problems rather more directly.
It is difficult to imagine a more scattered cast.
And yet, Insomniac preserves a kind of personality across those projects: fluidity, spectacle, humor when appropriate, immediately recognizable characters and systems expressive enough for playing to remain enjoyable even before progression enters the conversation.
Sony was already describing Insomniac’s signature in 2019 through its mixture of storytelling, humor and highly interactive worlds.
The studio itself now emphasizes creative ownership, the idea that team members should be able to propose and develop ideas that give a game its particular personality. Its own example is rather telling: the absurd respawn animations in Sunset Overdrive emerged when an animator decided to push a simple respawn mechanic in a much more distinctly “Insomniac” direction.
The detail could have remained functional.
Someone decided to turn it into a spectacle.
That is probably a pretty good definition of the studio.
Extraordinary characters with very ordinary problems
Its move into Marvel introduces another recurring idea.
Insomniac does not seem interested only in what a hero can do.
It is also very interested in what they have to carry.
In Marvel’s Spider-Man, Peter Parker can cross Manhattan in minutes, but he still has to deal with work, loved ones and the consequences of his choices. Insomniac explicitly describes its approach as an attempt to tell both a superhero story and a human story, centered on the people behind the mask.
That idea continues with Miles Morales.
And it now carries into Marvel’s Wolverine, where the studio says it wants to explore Logan as a darker hero, shaped by his past and by the consequences of his own violence.
The powers change.
The question remains familiar.
What is left of the hero when the costume comes off?
Good to know
- Insomniac Games was founded in 1994 by Ted Price, who would lead the studio for more than thirty years.
- Disruptor was the first game developed by Insomniac. It preceded Spyro the Dragon, which launched on PlayStation on September 9, 1998.
- Ratchet & Clank began in 2002 on PlayStation 2 and became one of the studio’s longest-running franchises.
- Resistance: Fall of Man was released in 2006 and accompanied the launch of PlayStation 3.
- Insomniac has not always developed exclusively for PlayStation. Sunset Overdrive launched for Xbox One in 2014 before reaching PC in 2018.
- Sony Interactive Entertainment acquired Insomniac Games in 2019, after more than twenty years of collaboration between the two companies.
- Ted Price stepped down from studio leadership in 2025. Chad Dezern, Jen Huang and Ryan Schneider then became co-Studio Heads of Insomniac Games.
- Insomniac currently lists its headquarters in Burbank, California.
- Marvel’s Wolverine is the studio’s next announced game. Its PlayStation 5 release is scheduled for September 15, 2026.
- Insomniac currently summarizes its vision as an ambition to create games that have a positive and lasting influence on people’s lives, an idea also reaffirmed by its new leadership following Ted Price’s departure.