Insomniac’s Spider-Man has ‘the saddest Easter egg ever’

What should have been a sweet surprise for a fan in Spider-Man has turned into “the best saddest Easter egg ever.” Insomniac Games is offering to patch it out anyway.

It involves fan Tyler Schultz, who in May tweeted at Insomniac asking for help proposing to his girlfriend. The studio and Marvel both liked the idea.

“Sure you can wait until Sept. 7?” Insomniac tweeted.

“We’ve just past [sic] our five years in April,” he replied, “so I think she’ll still be around in September lol.”

Narrator: She wasn’t.

Spider-Man, which launched on Friday, still shipped with the proposal in the game. “Maddie, will you marry me?” is on a movie marquee in the game.

A melancholy Shultz took to YouTube yesterday to thank Insomniac for including the message and to explain what had happened.

“The thing that sucks about this Easter egg is the date I’m making this video now, three, four weeks ago, my girlfriend dumped me to go with my brother, basically throwing away the five years we had together.” Schultz said. He said his girlfriend added that the video game message wasn’t the way she wanted to be proposed to, either.

“This might go down in history as the saddest Easter egg? I don’t know,” Schultz said. “Regardless, I’m actually kind of happy that it’s in this game. ... If anybody else wants to use that as their proposal, please do. ... I just want to see someone get married, through that thing.”

Jacinda Chew, Insomniac’s art director, saw Schultz tweet out the unfortunate news and offered to change out the marquee in the next patch.

“I’m pretty happy that that got into that game,” Schultz said. “It’s a nice little reminder too, you know, the almost mistake that I made.” He said that despite the end of the relationship, seeing the message in the game as promised helped him get through the breakup.

Update (9/12):

Madison Gamble — the Maddie in question — gave a statement to the Houston Press about her relationship with Schultz. She said that over the past year, she realized that their relationship had taken a turn for the worse.

“Our relationship turned into a mother and son relationship where I had to remind him about things, I had to deal with his financial mistakes, his violent outbursts etc,” she told them in a Facebook messages.

Gamble also said that she never liked video games, and only sat through them because she loved Schultz. She had given him a month to change his behavior, but nothing happened so she broke it off. Gamble never cheated on him and did not leave him for his half-brother.

She also clarified to Kotaku that she is not in a romantic relationship with Schultz’s half-brother and that they are simply close friends, a friendship that developed after Schultz sent his half-brother to “check up” on her.

She also mentioned that she never meant to hurt Schultz, something she wants to clarify since she’s been subjected to a barrage of harassment and threats online.