Marvel was on hand in SXSW to talk about, among other things, gaming. In the event, they claimed that they were attempting to build a single universe around the Marvel games, in the same vein as the Marvel movies come together to weave a cinematic universe.
Word about this comes from TQ Jefferson, Marvel’s VP for games. TQ also made comparisons to the comics as well as the movies. It’s worth noting here that Marvel was acquired by Disney in 2009, but have prior ongoing contracts with certain properties outside Disney. Particularly, Sony owns Spider-Man and Fox owns Fantastic Four and X-Men.
Can Marvel pull this off? If we look at popular Facebook game Avengers Alliance, as an example, Spider-Man, as well as members of the X-Men and Fantastic Four have shown up in the game. On the other hand, there is a new game based on the next Spider-Man film every time one of them comes out, and each game invariably plays around with Spider-Man mythology freely.
Of course, it would be too much to ask for a consistent and logical gaming Marvel universe, when one considers Marvel’s own comic book universe rarely meets that criteria. Comic book worlds invariably see reboots, reimaginings, and retcons.
How Marvel plans to pull this off remains to be seen, but it would seem the most logical course of action is this: each new Marvel hero movie, gets a game spinoff that hews closely to the movie. These movies are expected to culminate in the next Avengers movie. Subsequently, the game for that movie will tie in threads from the other movies.
Are games for Fox and Sony licensed games invited to this correlated gaming universe? Is the Lego Marvel universe? How about Avengers Alliance? We’ll have to wait for Marvel to tell us how they have planned this out – or better yet, show us.
