While Marvel Rivals is doing pretty damn well (shitty layoffs aside) with the whole lots of Marvel heroes coming together (not in that way) thing, there was once another way we could have seen the comics giant’s costumed crew crossover – via an MCU-eque “Marvel Gaming Universe”. For better or worse though, that idea never became a reality.
This ill-fated concept was discussed by Bungie co-founder Alexander Seropian – who also once served as Disney Interactive Studios’ vice president of game development – and Marvel Rivals writer Alex Irvine on a recent episode of the The Fourth Curtain podcast. The pair naturally got into why it didn’t end up happening, and it sounds like the answer might have something to do with execs not liking to think about tough lore questions.
“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, with Seropian adding that the concept was his “initiative”. The pitch was that this gaming universe would tie Marvel’s games together by putting them all in the same timeline/universe, with Seropian saying that it came before the MCU on the movie side of things was up and running.
However it didn’t get funded by Disney, with Irvine saying: “That was so frustrating because we came up with all these great ideas about how to do it”. The developer went on to outline some of those ideas.
“I was coming out of ARGs at that point,” he recalled, “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.”
In terms of why this MGU never got the green light, Irvine theorised that its downfall might have something to do with the quandaries it raised in terms of how it would have worked best. “Even back then,” he said, “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? I think some of those questions got complex enough that there were people at Disney who didn’t really want to deal with them.”
So, we never got a thing that might have linked the likes of Insomniac’s Spider-Man games to its upcoming Wolverine one, or even stuff from other studios like Skydance New Media’s Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra and Arkane’s Blade game. We have Rivals though, so you can at least still pit Venom against a shark called Jeff.
