Marvel's Spider-Man Miles Morales features a highly detailed recreation of New York City. However, due to copyright issues, a major landmark in the Big Apple is missing.
Insomniac Games has changed the Chrysler Building to a nondescript skyscraper on the Miles Morales map. Speaking to Game Informer, copyright lawyer Michael Lee explained that this is due to the Chrysler falling under the ownership of the Austrian company SIGNA Group and the New York real estate development company RFR Holding LLC.
"If you have just a basic box of a building that looks like just a generic building, you can't go around and sue every building in Manhattan, and say, 'You have stolen my idea of what a building looks like,'" Lee said. "You can't protect the functionality of something, but you could protect the artistic parts of it. So when it comes to certain architecture, whether it has big spires at the top, or whether it has curved glass, whether you see something and you see that it's unique and different, that's absolutely protected by copyright."
Insomniac's community director James Stevenson added that, when creating the game, they wanted to create a representation of the city that included as many landmarks as possible to further immerse the player in the universe. "Sometimes negotiations to use those locations [don't] work out, which was the case with the Chrysler Building in Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales," Stevenson said.
The Chrysler Building has featured prominently in other Marvel media, including The Avengers. It was also part of the game map in Marvel's Spider-Man before ownership of the building changed hands.
Developed by Insomniac Games and PlayStation Studios, Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales is available on both PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.
Source: Game Informer