One of the biggest defining features of Spider-Man: Miles Morales is its lovingly detailed depiction of New York City, including many of its iconic buildings and landmarks. Fans have noticed, however, that one particular building is missing from the game. The Chrysler Building, once the tallest building in the world prior to the Empire State Building just a few blocks away, does not appear in the New York-based video game.
The Chrysler Building, meanwhile, does appear in plenty of other Marvel material, including the MCU movies and the previous gaming title Marvel's Spider-Man, which has recently been remastered for the PS5. In fact, Marvel's Spider-Man directly included the building within the gameplay itself, providing players with a side-mission that required them to take a picture of the building, among several other New York City landmarks.
Going to the spot where the Chrysler Building usually sits in your copy of Spider-Man: Miles Morales will instead take you to the location of a nondescript, boxy building that is most definitely not the skyscraper that is found in real-world New York.
What some may not know here is that buildings can indeed be subject to copyright, with the Chrysler Building being one of them. Building owners have pursued legal action in the past when it comes to copying a building's design, and it can be imagined that these legal issues could spread to video games trying to replicate the cityscape. The building is indeed protected under copyright, meaning putting it in a game isn't as simple as just making the model and sticking it on the map. This means that the building's owners, for whatever reason, decided that they didn't want the building to show up in Spider-Man: Miles Morales.
"When creating our representation of the city we wanted to include as many landmarks as we could to add to the sense of immersion," said James Stevenson, Insomniac's community director, in a statement to Game Informer. "Sometimes negotiations to use those locations didn’t work out, which was the case with the Chrysler Building in Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales."
It looks like, for legal reasons, we won't be seeing the Chrysler building in the game anytime soon. Those looking for a more accurate depiction of the city will have to turn to other titles.
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