Ted Price was the financial controller of a medical start-up when the 3DO was announced in 1993. He had been playing a lot of Doom, and he saw that games on CD-ROM could be made far more cheaply than cartridge games. “It was all guesses, really,” he told Edge in 2011. With no experience of the games industry, he and the programmer Al Hastings built a demo of a first-person shooter and spent the summer of 1994 touting it up and down the American west coast. That studio, Insomniac Games, went on to make Spyro the Dragon, a Ratchet & Clank game nearly every year of the PlayStation 2’s life, and Marvel’s Spider-Man, and it stayed independent for a quarter of a century before Sony bought it.
Fast facts
- Founded: 1994, by Ted Price, with Al Hastings and his brother Brian Hastings.
- Home: Burbank, California; by 2011 it also had a studio in North Carolina.
- First game: Disruptor (1996), funded by Universal Interactive Studios.
- Series: Spyro the Dragon (1998–2000), Ratchet & Clank (from 2002), Resistance (2006–2011), Marvel’s Spider-Man (from 2018).
- Owner: independent until Sony completed its purchase on 15 November 2019.
Disruptor and Spyro
The demo found a backer in Universal Interactive Studios, and Brian Hastings joined to become the studio’s chief creative officer. The start was rough. “We completely blew the first official milestone we had,” Price admitted. Help came from Universal’s Mark Cerny and the designer Michael John. Price said he learned a great deal “about production and design from Mark”. Cerny later explained why Universal had paid for the game on the PlayStation rather than the 3DO: “We saw the prototype running on 3DO and agreed to fund development on PlayStation.” Disruptor (1996) gave a first-person shooter psychic powers, and Price later saw it as the start of the inventive weapons that became the studio’s trademark.
Insomniac’s next game shared a lot with its neighbour on the Universal lot, Naughty Dog. The cartoonist Charles Zembillas, who had designed the Crash Bandicoot cast, also created Spyro, and Gamers’ Republic described the game as made “with Mark Cerny overseeing every last scale”. Spyro the Dragon (1998) put a small purple dragon in open, brightly coloured 3D worlds. Insomniac’s Matt Whiting told Edge that year that the game had camera controls but he would be “happier if players never feel the need to use them”. Ripto’s Rage (1999) and Year of the Dragon (2000) followed. Universal kept the rights to Spyro, and the series went on without Insomniac.
Ratchet & Clank
For the PlayStation 2 Insomniac created its own characters: Ratchet, a “lovable lombax wielding a giant spanner” in Wireframe’s words, and his robot companion, Clank. “Ratchet, which was our attempt to take the platform genre in a different direction, was where, I think, we hit our stride in terms of what we love to do,” Price said. Ratchet & Clank (2002) was a platform game built around an arsenal of absurd weapons and gadgets, and a new one appeared each year: Going Commando (2003), Up Your Arsenal (2004) and Deadlocked (Ratchet: Gladiator in Europe, 2005).
The schedule was punishing. In 2005 the studio’s communications director, Ryan Schneider, told Edge that Insomniac had been named the third-best small company to work for in the United States, but “I’d never sit here and say that we don’t have crunch.” He described the studio then as “a completely independent developer” with “a really good and exclusive relationship with Sony”. The series carried on into the next generation with Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction (2007), Quest for Booty (2008) and A Crack in Time (2009).
Resistance and life outside Sony
Resistance: Fall of Man (2006), a first-person shooter in which the alien Chimera have overrun Europe and the player fights through York, Manchester, Nottingham, Grimsby and London, launched with the PlayStation 3; Edge called it “the most credible PS3 launch title”. Resistance 2 (2008) and Resistance 3 (2011) followed. By 2011 Insomniac had about 220 developers and two teams working at once: the North Carolina studio was making Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One while Burbank made Resistance 3.
That year Insomniac also announced its first game for several platforms, a four-player co-operative shooter that became Fuse (2013), published by Electronic Arts. It followed it with Sunset Overdrive (2014), an exclusive for Microsoft’s Xbox One.
Spider-Man and Sony
Marvel’s Spider-Man (2018) was made for Sony on the PlayStation 4 under licence from Marvel. A year later, in August 2019, Sony agreed to buy Insomniac. The deal was completed on 15 November 2019; Sony’s annual report put the price at about ¥24.9 billion, $229 million. Spider-Man: Miles Morales launched with the PlayStation 5 in November 2020. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (2021) used the new console’s fast storage to switch whole worlds in an instant; Wireframe thought the effect “suitably blows minds almost every single time you use it”, though the rest of the game was “nigh-on exactly the same thing we were playing on the PlayStation 2”. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 (2023) sold more than 2.5 million copies in its first 24 hours, the fastest-selling PlayStation Studios game to that date.
In December 2023 a ransomware group calling itself Rhysida broke into Insomniac’s systems and, when no ransom was paid, published more than a million internal files, including staff records and early material from the studio’s next game, Marvel’s Wolverine. Ted Price retired in March 2025, handing the studio to three co-heads: Ryan Schneider, Jen Huang and Chad Dezern, all long-serving staff. Marvel’s Wolverine came out on the PlayStation 5 in September 2026.
Sources
- Edge issue 230, August 2011, pp. 130–131: Ted Price interview (his career before games; Doom and the 3DO; Al and Brian Hastings; the summer of 1994 and Universal; the missed milestone; Mark Cerny and Michael John; Disruptor’s psychic powers; Ratchet & Clank; about 220 developers; the multiplatform Overstrike).
- Edge issue 41, January 1997: Mark Cerny on funding Disruptor for the PlayStation (quoted in the Mark Cerny entry).
- Retro Gamer issue 117, August 2013, p. 67: Charles Zembillas “created Spyro The Dragon for Insomniac, based on the Universal lot with Naughty Dog”.
- Gamers’ Republic issue 3, August 1998: Spyro the Dragon preview (quoted in the Mark Cerny entry).
- Edge issue 63, October 1998: Matt Whiting of Insomniac on Spyro the Dragon’s camera.
- Edge issue 155, November 2005: interview with Ryan Schneider (an annual Ratchet & Clank; crunch; independence and Sony).
- Edge issue 170, Christmas 2006: Resistance: Fall of Man (“the most credible PS3 launch title”; the Chimera and the route from York to London).
- Edge issue 233, November 2011, p. 103: interview with Cameron Christian (the North Carolina and Burbank teams).
- Wireframe issue 52, June 2021: Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart review (Ratchet as a “lovable lombax”).
- Sony Corporation, annual report on Form 20-F for the year to 31 March 2020 (public record): Insomniac Games acquired on 15 November 2019 for ¥24,895 million ($229 million). Reported in “Sony paid $229 million to acquire Insomniac Games”, UploadVR, 2020 (web, secondary). https://uploadvr.com/sony-paid-229-million-insomniac-games/
- “Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is immediately the fastest-selling PlayStation Studios game ever”, Push Square, October 2023, and “Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 surpassed 2.5 million sales in 24 hours”, Shacknews, October 2023 (web, secondary). https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2023/10/marvels-spider-man-2-is-immediately-the-fastest-selling-playstation-studios-game-ever
- “Insomniac says it’s ‘saddened and angered’ by massive leak of 1.3 million files”, Engadget, December 2023, and Cyber Daily on the Rhysida attack, December 2023 (web, secondary). https://www.engadget.com/insomniac-says-its-saddened-and-angered-by-massive-leak-of-13-million-files-172822264.html
- “Insomniac Games’ Ted Price to retire in March”, Game Developer, January 2025, and Push Square, January 2025 (web, secondary): Price’s retirement and the three co-heads. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/insomniac-games-ted-price-to-retire-in-march
- “Marvel’s Wolverine gets a Metacritic score”, LevelUp, 10 September 2026 (web, secondary): release on 15 September 2026. https://www.levelup.com/en/news/marvels-wolverine-gets-a-metacritic-score-and-reviews-are-worse-than-expected/
- Wikipedia, “Insomniac Games” (web, secondary): the founding date; Universal’s ownership of Spyro; the release years of the Ratchet & Clank, Resistance and Spider-Man games, Fuse (EA) and Sunset Overdrive (Microsoft); the August 2019 announcement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insomniac_Games