It’s not even been 24 hours since the season two finale of Invincible aired on Amazon Prime Video, and someone has already created a mod that lets you play as one of the episode’s lawyer-friendly cameos in Insomniac’s first Spider-Man game.
Warning: Mild spoilers for Invincible season two ahead.
If you’ve seen the episode, you’ll know it involves protagonist Mark being flung to different dimensions, including one where he meets another costumed superhero, one who has spider powers and is in the midst of fighting an octopus themed villain with mechanical arms. No, they’re not Spider-Man and Doctor Octopus, but Agent Spider and Professor Octopus. They’re completely different characters.
Unsurprisingly, Nexus Mods user Rezauddin Nur (as spotted by IGN) has created their own character model of Agent Spider, allowing PC players to mod him into Marvel’s Spider-Man. It’s a very well designed model too, going for cel-shaded visuals to make him better resemble his appearance in the Invincible cartoon. It’s a shame Spider-Man 2 isn’t on PC; it’d be fun to see Agent Spider modded into that game as well.
In case you’re wondering why Invincible has a blatant Spider-Man parody to begin with, it’s a whole reference to the time Invincible and Spider-Man met each other in a one-off crossover comic from 2005. The show obviously couldn’t incorporate the actual Spider-Man (and I sincerely doubt Marvel would’ve agreed to it if asked), so this was a cute way to get around it. As an extra welcome touch, the show even got Josh Keaton, who voiced Spider-Man in the Spectacular Spider-Man cartoon and several video games, to play Agent Spider. According to creator Robert Kirkman in a Variety interview, though, Amazon’s legal team kept a very close eye on the scene: “Amazon legal, painstakingly, was like, ‘No, the costume can’t be that color. We gotta get away from this and that.'”
This wasn’t the only cheeky cameo from the finale either. In one scene, Mark is clearly meant to be addressing an off-screen Batman from DC Comics, and another sees him in a zombie dimension that’s likely an homage to Kirkman’s The Walking Dead comics. At one point, Mark also uses a sniper rifle from Fortnite, which was approved by Epic Games and came about thanks to Invincible characters being added to the battle royale as skins.
