An interesting story has emerged regarding the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the world (or should we say, universe?) of video games.
As reported on The Game Post, two former Marvel/Disney employees pitched the idea of a Marvel Gaming Universe. This universe could have been like what you are imagining in your head – a set of video games that form part of an interconnected universe.
Just so we’re clear, this isn’t some rumor that comes from some popular content creator that sometimes gets things wrong because they didn’t interpret the information that they received accurately. Alex Seropian, one of the founders of Bungie, and multimedia author and screenwriter Alex Irvine are the two said former Marvel/Disney employees who made these claims on Seropian’s podcast.
Seropian left Bungie in 2004 to launch a company called Wideload Games, which made Stubbs the Zombie. In 2009 Wideload Games was acquired by Disney, and it was in this way that Seropian ended up becoming vice president for video game development on Disney Interactive Studios.
Subsequently, Irvine is a particularly proficient author, making both original and licensed work for novels, comic books, video games and at least one TV show in 2015’s Transformers: Robots In Disguise. Irvine was also involved in Marvel Rivals, potentially one of the developers recently fired by NetEase when they shut down the game’s Seattle office.
The Marvel Gaming Universe was Seropian’s idea, and Irvine contributed the idea to add an ARG (alternate reality game) layer to the whole thing. Irvine himself already wrote some ARGs at that point, and he saw this as an opportunity to connect the video games to the comics, and more.
Now, if we step back to think about this, this could have been an incredible project. At the start of the MCU, the first video games coming out of Sega were the PlayStation 3/ Xbox 360 games based on the Captain America and Iron Man movies and published by Sega.
In the subsequent years, the most successful Marvel console games at this time were Insomniac’s Marvel’s Spider-Man video games. We also got several different initiatives and ideas, such as Marvel being the centerpiece of Disney Infinity 2.0, the ill-fated Marvel games published by Square Enix, the very popular Marvel vs. Capcom 3, and the subsequent scandalous franchise destroyer that was Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite.
A coordinated effort to make united Marvel video games could have certainly worked out poorly, but the alternative is really only partly a success. In fact, given that Insomniac suffered layoffs after releasing Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, even its biggest success wasn’t that successful. So can we really say that everything was better the way that it is now?
As you can imagine, the reason the Marvel Gaming Universe didn’t happen was that Marvel was hesitant to give it a try. Given their own troubled history in making Marvel movies, and the path to regaining full ownership of all their properties back, can you really blame them? The logistics of making all those video games come together seemed to be as daunting as doing it for their movies and shows now. But one does wonder, if Marvel and Disney were willing to commit with their own money and people, if their own overall video game output would have itself turned out better.
