Inside Marvel Games With Bill Rosemann, Creative Force for Good
How the comics writer learned to talk to gamers
Bill Rosemann is such a lifetime comic-book fan that he even frames his own career as a kind of unlikely superhero tale.
He’s particularly fond of Spider-Man—an ordinary guy who finds himself with extraordinary powers. In Bill’s case, his extraordinary power is the opportunity to lead creative direction on Marvel Games after two decades in the Marvel universe, much of it on the comic-book side as a writer and editor. And it’s a power he doesn’t take lightly.
“For 20 years I’ve just been absorbing, like the Hulk, absorbing this gamma radiation—absorbing, absorbing, absorbing for 20 years,” Rosemann told Muse last month at Clio Entertainment judging. “And with that power comes a great responsibility to share that with our partners.”
Rosemann—part of a team that revived the old Guardians of the Galaxy comics in 2008, leading to a huge new cross-platform Marvel property—has had plenty of reason to feel good about his superpowers lately. Marvel’s Spider-Man game for the PlayStation 4, created with Insomniac Games, has been a smash hit, breaking sales records just about everywhere.
In the video above, Bill—who was a Clio Entertainment judge in Gaming this year—tells Muse about the Spider-Man game, Marvel’s mobile titles, how Marvel’s comics inform its games, and how he got so deep into comic books in the first place.