The Marvel Cinematic Universe has come to dominate leisure with its interconnected sequence of movies and TV reveals that every one tie collectively to type a long-running, cohesive narrative. Marvel video video games, nonetheless, don’t exist in the identical universe, telling tales solely separate and unrelated to one another. Insomniac’s Marvel’s Spider-Man video games, for instance, don’t have anything to do with Eidos-Montreal’s Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. Equally, upcoming Marvel video games comparable to Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra, Marvel’s Wolverine, and Marvel’s Blade, don’t have any connective tissue.
However there was as soon as an concept at Disney to create a Marvel Gaming Universe that may do for Marvel video video games what the MCU went on to do for Marvel motion pictures and TV reveals. So what occurred?
Talking on The Fourth Curtain podcast, host Alexander Seropian and visitor Alex Irvine recalled this MGU concept, which each labored on, and revealed why it fell by the wayside.
Seropian, maybe greatest often known as one of many founders of Halo and Future developer Bungie, went on to run Disney’s online game enterprise earlier than leaving in 2012. Irvine was the long-running author of Marvel video games, most lately engaged on the world-building, dialogue, and character backstories for smash hit Marvel Rivals.
Discussing his prior work on Marvel video games, Irvine mentioned the scrapped MGU.
“After I first began engaged on Marvel video games, there was this concept that they had been going to create a Marvel gaming universe that was going to exist in the identical manner that the MCU did,” Irvine stated. “It by no means actually occurred.”
Seropian then defined that the MGU was his “initiative,” nevertheless it by no means bought funded by the higher-ups at Disney.
“After I was at Disney, that was my initiative, ‘Hey, let’s tie these video games collectively.’ It was pre-MCU,” Seropian stated. “However it didn’t get funded.”
Irvine, who had labored on the enduring Halo alternate actuality sport (ARG) I Love Bees whereas at Bungie, went into some element on how this MGU would have labored.
“That was so irritating as a result of we got here up with all these nice concepts about how you can do it,” he stated.
“And I used to be popping out of ARGs at that time and pondering, ‘Wouldn’t it’s cool if we had some ARG facets?’ There could be a spot the place gamers might go that every one the video games touched, and we might transfer them backwards and forwards from sport to sport. We might hyperlink in comics, we might loop in something, we might do authentic stuff. After which, as Alex stated, it didn’t get funded. So we made a bunch of video games.”
However why did the MGU fail to get the interior buy-in to maneuver ahead? Irvine urged the thought turned so complicated it ended up placing some individuals at Disney off.
“Even again then, we had been attempting to determine, ‘If there’s going to be this MGU, how is it totally different from the comics? How is it totally different from the films? How are we going to resolve if it stays constant?’ And I feel a few of these questions bought complicated sufficient that there have been individuals at Disney who didn’t actually need to take care of them,” Irvine defined.
It’s enjoyable to think about what might need been had the MGU concept bought the funding it wanted to turn out to be a actuality. Maybe if it had, Insomniac’s Spider-Man video games would have existed in the identical universe as Sq. Enix’s ill-fated Marvel’s Avengers and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, with characters from every sport making cameo appearances throughout the titles or the tales all constructing in the direction of some epic Endgame-style occasion.
Wanting forward, there are questions over Insomniac’s Marvel’s Wolverine sport. Will it’s set throughout the identical universe as Marvel’s Spider-Man? May Spider-Man or some other character from these video games find yourself making a cameo in Wolverine in a roundabout way?
Alas, the MGU goes down as yet one more scrapped online game concept. Though, maybe in one other universe someplace, it’s a actuality…
Wesley is the UK Information Editor for IGN. Discover him on Twitter at @wyp100. You may attain Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.