Editor’s take: Sometimes bugs are game-breaking, and other times they’re game-making. Unexpectedly becoming a web-slinging patio space heater in Spider-Man: Miles Morales, is definitely an instance of the latter.
Recently, players have found themselves swinging through New York city as random inanimate objects. A manhole cover, a fence, a lamppost, some fairy lights, a wall, a piece of ground. And, a patio heater dubbed ‘Heater Parker.’
I found one in the new Spider-Man game, where I turned into a patio heater for no apparent reason. pic.twitter.com/ApChq2nB1s
— Andy H (@DoctorCuriosity) November 27, 2020
Heater Parker, off to fight my stereo.
Inexplicably, the patio heater moves and acts exactly as you’d expect a web-slinging patio heater to. It’s beautiful.
I BROKE SPIDERMAN LMFAOOOOOOOOO pic.twitter.com/xJUQi6BCsI
— Froste 💯 (@Froste) November 18, 2020
In this video, you can see the rapidity of the rotating inanimate objects the player’s character model becomes — and the game is oddly playable as most of them — this leads us to the hypothesized explanation for this bug: it’s believed that the game fills up the memory buffers when the character moves quickly through the environment, causing the character model to be swapped with pre-loaded object models at similar addresses.
Spider-Man: Miles Morales’ developer, Insomniac Games, chimed in to say that the bug is as “equally embarrassing as it is heart-warming.” Players have called on them to instate the bug permanently, either as a mode in the menu or as an easter egg triggerable by in-game actions.
But if the bug doesn’t stay in the game, it’ll be sticking around the Spider-Verse.
Equally as embarrassing as it is heart-warming https://t.co/LV0xGri7hD
— Insomniac Games (@insomniacgames) November 28, 2020
Phil Lord was the writer and producer of Into the Spider-Verse.
Although spiders aren’t normally too friendly to bugs, this Spider-Man game has only been augmented by this one. In an era of problematic bugs, it’s nice to see an amusing one.