NetEase has announced the future foundation of Marvel Rivals for 2025.
They made this announcement on the official Marvel Rivals Twitter account:
“Get ready to welcome Marvel’s First family in Marvel Rivals. Trailer on January 6th at 8:00 AM PST / 16:00 UTC. Be there. #MarvelRivals #FantasticFour #NewYorkCity”
As we can plainly see, the announcement came with a sweet picture of the Fantastic Four members; Mister Fantastic, Invisible Woman, the second Human Torch, the Thing, and lest anyone forget or not realize it, H.E.R.B.I.E.
Marvel’s super-team debuted in their own eponymous comic book in November 1961, generally designed as Marvel’s answer to DC’s Justice League of America. Now, we won’t dive in here on the controversy regarding its creation. Suffice to say the comic book’s first publication run through the 1960s, with Jack Kirby credited as artist and Stan Lee as editor, is one of the most successful and influential in the history of the medium.
The Fantastic Four are famous and popular enough on their own, but this run also introduced many of Marvel’s other heavyweight characters who would go on to be huge outside of comics as well. That includes Doctor Doom, Black Panther, Galactus, the Silver Surfer, and the Skrulls.
Now let’s get back to H.E.R.B.I.E., whom we suspect many gamers took for granted was just a generic robot. In spite of his slight redesign, his visor face, which predates EVE from Wall-E by decades, is unmistakable. H.E.R.B.I.E. was introduced in Hanna-Barbera’s The New Fantastic Four cartoon in 1978 to replace Johnny Storm (who wasn’t being censored, but was off limits because Marvel tried to make him his own movie!) H.E.R.B.I.E. also has the distinction of being the last character Jack Kirby designed for Marvel Comics before he left for DC.
We know Marvel Rivals fans are really excited about Invisible Woman being playable, but we hope they can see that everyone in this motley crew will definitely be worth keeping an eye out for. NetEase already shocked some fans when they implemented Dr. Strange’s Portal-like dimension bending powers on an online multiplayer multiplatform game. They should also keep an eye out on how far they go to express the limits of Johnny and Susan Storm’s powers, and for that matter, Reed’s apparent limitless elasticity.
Good old Benjamin Grimm can toe to toe with the Hulk, so we expect he’ll be a fun tank with maybe more mobility. As for H.E.R.B.I.E., we genuinely don’t know what to expect. He may end up tagging along with one of the Four after all. But NetEase has shown the extent of their creativity with Jeff The Land Shark, so they could charm us yet with another pint-sized character with their own gameplay loop.
With a great view of the Baxter Building in the background, NetEase clearly already set their Marvel research team to push the fanservice hard. We’re now looking forward to what they will be showing us with their latest roster additions next week.
