The 2023 breach of Insomniac Games is still one of the ugliest chapters in modern game development, and the studio’s Marvel’s Wolverine is only now escaping its shadow. Speaking to Polygon at PlayStation’s London offices, game director Mike Daly finally addressed what the attack meant for the team behind Logan’s long-awaited debut.
“The data breach was a tough time for the studio,” Daly said. “That was not fun. It led to a lot of anxiety.”
For anyone who missed it: in late 2023, hacking group Rhysida stole an enormous trove of Insomniac data — future plans, strategy documents, personal employee information, and a mountain of images, video and design files tied to the then-secret Wolverine. After a US$2 million ransom demand went unpaid, most of it was dumped online. The scale of the leak was, as the industry quickly agreed, unprecedented.
The fallout hasn’t fully faded. As fresh preview footage circulates, some fans are lining it up against the leaked builds of an earlier version and drawing their own conclusions — not all of them kind. Daly’s message is essentially: don’t read too much into a game caught mid-development against its will.
What kept the studio moving, he says, was a wall of support from every direction.
“We got through it, I think, because the studio did a great job supporting each other, Sony did a great job supporting us, and our fans supported us too,” Daly explained. “We felt like, despite the data breach, we were able to keep going… we had the support of everybody to get back up and running and continue to do our best with the game that we’re making.”
The timing matters here. Daly stepped in as game director in 2024, after the hack, working alongside creative director Marcus Smith — the pair who previously steered Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. They replaced the original directing team of Brian Horton and Cameron Christian, a change attributed to “creative decisions” in a 2024 Game File report. That’s a lot of upheaval for one project, and it’s easy to assume the breach reshaped the whole thing.
Daly insists it didn’t.
“Ultimately, it was disruptive, but it never changed our goals,” he said. “And I do feel like we were able to just get past it and keep doing our best.”
It’s a measured takeaway from an episode that could have derailed the project entirely. The leaked footage that fans keep dissecting is, by Daly’s account, a snapshot of a game that has kept evolving toward the same target it always had — even after strangers pried the studio’s roadmap wide open. Whether that resilience shows up in the finished Wolverine is the question every PlayStation owner is now waiting to answer for themselves.
