Game Theory - Spiderman DESTROYED New York! (Spider-Man: Miles Morales)

Episode Date: August 20, 2023

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he breaks down the science behind the ending of Spider-Man: Miles Morales! Credits: Writers: Matthew Patrick and Justin Kuiper Editors: Alex "Sedge" Sedgwick, Danial "BanditRants" Keristoufi and Shannon (Bomb0i) Assistant Editor: AlyssaBeCrazy Sound Editor: Yosi Berman

Theory, game theory, doing science till you're weary, ranking heroes using math, angry commenters send their rafts, watch out, here comes the game theory. Hello internet, welcome to Game Theory, the show that looks good in tights. Today our focus is on Spider-Man, specifically Miles Morales. Probably should clarify that now that there are two Spider-Men in town. Well, actually just the one since Peter Parker has taken a well-earned. vacay, but still. MJ's headed overseas for the bugle and requested me as her photographer. Kind of a working vacation for us. So let's not let Peter distract us here. We've got much more

interesting things to talk about today because with a new Spider-Man comes new powers, and with new powers comes new responsibility. You see, Spider-Man Miles Morales just came out, and as upgrade 2.0, the original Spider-Man, it's got himself some feature bloat. In addition to your standard issue spider skills, Miles has camouflage ability and bioelectricity. Now don't even get me started on this. Maybe get me started a little on this because what the? First, the camouflage. Great, you got yourself special DNA powers from a spider bite that make you invisible. Cool, totally fine with that. But why are your clothes able to change too? These are DNA-based powers. I'm not asking for streaker man running around town. I'm just saying that your DNA magic should not be

able to cloak your literal cloak. Gripe number two, your bioelectricity is called Venom Strikes. Yeah, that That's not gonna get confusing with another character in this franchise. Like a turd in the wind. Ugh, digression over. Thank you for letting me get that off my chest. Anyway, thanks to Miles' electrocharged Venom powers, Miles succeeds in a battle against Rhino where Peter fails. It's enough to make Pete realize that he's quickly becoming obsolete.

Bioelectricity. Wow. Gotta be honest. Little jealous. Now, of course, these electrical abilities are useful during combat, but to me, there's something much more interesting about him. Throughout the game, Miles is forced to use his body like a capacitor, aka a device that stores up electrical energy. Sometimes he's sucking the power out of security systems to shut him down or get past electrified barriers.

Sometimes he's powering things up like a battery on two legs with excellent taste in music. But without question, the most impressive feat we see Miles accomplished comes at the end. So, uh, spoiler warning, because it's kind of impossible to actually talk about the game's big climactic scene without, you know, saying everything that happens during that scene. So, the final mission of the game, the Battle for Harlem, features the climactic showdown between our two opposing forces. In this corner is Roxon, a mega corporation that's promising to deliver high-efficiency power to all of Harlem with their innovative new fuel source called New Form. What you're standing next to is a New Form reactor.

No points for guessing that New Form is actually dangerous. Someone's gonna care about a few sick people up town or a dead engineer. Prolonged exposure to it can result in health defects like bone marrow. And in our other corner is the high-tech terrorist group known as the Underground, vigilantes that are trying to expose Roxon's evil business practices. If you're wondering why the underground is one of the bad guy factions here, well, their way of sending a message about the dangers of Roxon isn't by, you know, whistleblowing or contacting the news or anything like that, but rather by blowing up a reactor, which will actually cause an explosion that destroys all of Harlem.

You're not just going to destroy Roxon Plaza. You're gonna vaporize all of Harlem. After a battle against the underground's leader, the Tinker, Miles finally makes his way to the reactor. And in the same way that we've seen him drain the power of electrical devices across the city, Miles draws the power from the reactor. But of course, that is a lot of energy, and Miles, as a human capacitor, has to do something with it all. Get them far away. I can't hold this in much longer. Luckily, the head of the underground has a last minute change of heart and decides to help Miles out by grabbing him and flying high above the city. so that when he releases the massive explosive discharge of energy,

nothing and nobody is close enough to get hurt. In the end, Miles survived so he can return for the sequel, Harlem is saved and the Tinkerer has a heroic final sacrifice. But because we never see the body, she can always return in the sequel if they feel like it. That final cutscene is, quite frankly, an awesome display of power, bravery, and self-sacrifice. It's also completely useless. Oh sure, it may look all heroic, but Miles Morales completely fails to protect

the city in this moment. Miles completely botches the rescue of New York City and kills millions, but to understand why, we first need to look a bit closer at the reactor. At the start of the game, we see a big presentation from Roxanne's head of R&D, Simon Krieger. As we find out, this reactor runs on a fictional fuel source known as Newform. Just one canister of this revolutionary fuel source is enough to supply Harlem with clean, safe energy for the next 500 years. Of course, new form is actually making people sick. Meaning it's a threat to everyone in Harlem, to which I say, why would you not build the power plant somewhere else?

Like, I don't know, middle of the desert? That is literally what's done with tons of other real-world power plants. Guess what? The existence of power grids make it so that the power plant that supplies energy to all of Harlem doesn't actually have to be in Harlem. In fact, tons of people in New York City have their homes powered by electricity that's generated by Niagara Falls, which is like four of.

hundred miles away. You can even maintain it using the robotic help that we know exists in the Marvel universe or heck just use some of the holograms that we see throughout the game. Roxon's plan to build their sickness-causing power plant in the middle of a population center is not just evil, but let's get real, it's just bad business. Seriously, have you looked at real estate prices for New York City? A moderately sized commercial building is gonna cost you nearly a billion, billion with a B dollars. Maybe it's time I just quit YouTube and become the accountant for an evil corporation. Probably six. I'll save him a bunch of money. Does Amazon have any openings? Since a single canister of Newform has enough energy to power Harlem for 500 years, all we need to know is how much energy Harlem consumes in a year and then multiply it by 500. Luckily, we have ourselves a handy tool for calculating this exact number.

Thanks to Vijay Matty, a professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University. This map shows the estimated annual energy consumption of New York City on a granular block-by-block basis. Toteling up all of Harlem gives us a total of... Let's see... carry the one, 91,860 megawatt hours per year. That means that if a single canister of new form has enough energy to power Harlem for 500 years, it is packing a total of 45.93 million megawatt hours. Or to put that in SI units, which will make it easier for our calculations later, 165.3 million giga joules. Why are you not impressed? Oh, I

know, because those numbers are meaningless. I've been doing this for 8. decade and I still can't automatically see megawatt hours or gigajoules and know whether that's a really impressive number or not. So to put those numbers in perspective, the amount of energy that Miles is absorbing from the reactor is approximately 95% the amount of energy from the sun that hits the Earth in one second, or five times as much as all the nuclear power plants on Earth generate every single day. It is 2,625 times as much energy as was unleashed by the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima during World War II. And that is just the energy in a single canister of the stuff. At the end of the game, we're told that Miles has to stop the reactor because if it blows up,

the resulting explosion would destroy all of Harlem. You're not just going to destroy Roxanne Plaza. You're going to vaporize all of Harlem. But hoo-hoo-hoo-boy! This would go way beyond just destroying Harlem. The most powerful nuclear weapon ever tested was the Tsar Bomba, which was created by the USSR during the Cold War. It had an explosive yield of around 240,

million gigajoules and well take a look at the mushroom cloud yourself. That picture was taken at a distance of a hundred miles or a hundred and sixty one kilometers away and you can still see the cloud which itself is 40 miles or 65 kilometers high. Now what's notable is that this bomb was actually detonated at an elevation of 2.5 miles or 4 kilometers above the ground and it still left a massive crater below it. Not only that but structures over 500 miles away from ground zero were still hit. by the after effects of the explosion. To put that in perspective, if you detonated that same explosive yield over Harlem, people as far as North Carolina would be feeling it. Heck, people in Canada would be feeling it. Zarbomba actually created a seismic wave in the Earth's crust that circled the globe three separate times before it finally dissipated. Now Miles's discharge, ugh, that sounds gross, his electrical explosion isn't quite as powerful as Zarbamba. His yield is only 68% as powerful as, you know, the most powerful nuclear weapon to ever be tested on Earth. But it does raise an important point here, which is that the Tinkerer's simple plan of flying miles,

ah, miles above the Harlem city block to insulate the city from the effects of the explosion, isn't the magical cure-all that you'd be hoping for. So, how bad is the damage we're talking about here? Well, in that final scene, we see the Tinkerer running up the side of a building, only to hold miles just slightly above the cloud line. The tallest building in Harlem is the Harlem River Park Towers 1 and 2, standing at around 428 feet or 130 meters tall. Not super high.

So, that's our initial launch point. And from there, there are technically three layers of clouds, low, middle, and high clouds. The lowest layer caps off at 6,500 feet or 2,000 meters. And considering her launch point is significantly lower than that, we're gonna say that this is absolutely the highest height that the tinkerer is able to get. Using this website, Nuclearsecrecy.com, we can actually see what happens when you detonate a 34,000 kilo-ton bomb 6,500 feet over New York City. So, did Miles manage to save Harlem?

Let's find out in 3, 2, 1, detonate. Nope, big nope. Basically, all of Harlem is vaporized as it falls within what's called the Fireball Zone. The rest of central New York City is in the heavy blast damage zone, where heavy concrete buildings are severely damaged or demolished, and fatalities approach 100%. Goodbye Central Park, goodbye Times Square, goodbye Broadway. Well, there wasn't really anything happening there anyway this year,

and I have Hamilton on Disney Plus, so really that one wasn't too much of a loss. The entire rest of the city, as well as all the surrounding boroughs, fall pretty solidly into the moderate damage zone, where most residential buildings collapse and fatalities are widespread. My conservative estimate looking at this data is that, 4 million people die in the resulting explosion. So, it was a nice thought tinkerer, but you really didn't make that much of a difference.

But fortunately, our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man survives in the apocalyptic fallout. And the fact that he was able to absorb all of this energy into his body is a serious testament to his capabilities as a superhero. I mean, it's not quite MCU's Thor allowing the entire energy of a star to pass through his body, but he's doing pretty darn good. To give some context, a lightning strike has the power of about 10 gigawatts. So what Miles is experiencing is the equivalent of getting struck by 1,180,000 lightning bolts simultaneously. So you know what? I think I take back what I said.

Maybe Miles is actually a better match for Thor the God of Thunder than I thought. And yet New York is apparently still full of street criminals who think they can go toe to toe with Miles using nothing but their fists. Maybe that's the most unbelievable part of this game. Nope, definitely the fact that the explosion didn't destroy all of New York. Hard to be a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. just accidentally nuked the neighborhood. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory.

Thanks for watching.