The Marvel Cinematic Universe changed movies as we know it. But what about the Marvel Games Universe? It didn’t happen, but it could have. Even before the MCU was a thing, Alex Irvine had an idea to create the MGU, as it were. Unfortunately, for various reasons, it never came together.
On a recent episode of The Fourth Curtain podcast (via IGN), Irvine spoke with host Alexander Seropian. They both worked on this shared Marvel video game universe years ago. Seropian helped found the gaming company Bungie before running Disney’s video game business for a time. Irvine, meanwhile, was the long-running writer of Marvel games. Most recently, he worked on the smash hit that is Marvel Rivals.
“When I first started working on Marvel games, there was this idea that they were going to create a Marvel gaming universe that was going to exist in the same way that the MCU did. It never really happened,” Irvine explained. “When I was at Disney, that was my initiative, ‘Hey, let’s tie these games together.’ It was pre-MCU. But it didn’t get funded,” Seropian added.
In recent years, we’ve had plenty of Marvel video games, including the hit Spider-Man on PlayStation, as well as its sequels. We’ve also had some misfires, such as Marvel’s Avengers, which lost a ton of money for Square Enix. There was also Guardians of the Galaxy, which was a critical success, but somewhat disappointing commercially. The same can be said of the turn-based Marvel’s Midnight Suns. None of these games were connected, but Irvine’s idea was to try and connect a series of titles like these earlier in the 2000s.
“Even back then, we were trying to figure out, ‘If there’s going to be this MGU, how is it different from the comics? How is it different from the movies? How are we going to decide if it stays consistent?’ And I think some of those questions got complex enough that there were people at Disney who didn’t really want to deal with them.”
“That was so frustrating because we came up with all these great ideas about how to do it,” Irvine added. “I was coming out of ARGs at that point and thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we had some ARG aspects?’ There would be a place where players could go that all the games touched, and we could move them back and forth from game to game. We could link in comics, we could loop in anything, we could do original stuff.”
Whether or not this is an idea that Marvel loops back around to? Time will tell. Plenty of Marvel games are in the works, including this year’s 1943: The Rise of Hydra. New Iron Man and Blade games have also been announced, but they’re still seemingly years away from release. Similarly, Marvel’s Wolverine has been in development for years, but has been hit with several setbacks along the way.
Marvel’s 1943: The Rise of Hydra is set to arrive sometime in 2025.
What do you think? Would you have liked to see the MGU come to fruition? Or do you think we were better off without it? Join in on the conversation over on Facebook or Twitter!
