Did You Know Marvel Almost Had a ‘Gaming Universe’? Here’s What Happened…
By Movieguide® Contributor
A former writer for Marvel Games revealed that there was once an idea at the company to tie all of their video games together to create a cohesive story, similar to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
“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,” video game writer Alex Irvine told The Fourth Curtain podcast, per IGN. “It never really happened.”
“That was so frustrating because we came up with all these great ideas about how to do it…” he continued. “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. And then, it didn’t get funded.”
At the time, a massive interconnected universe had yet to be tried in movies or TV, and higher up executives at Disney got confused by the complications. Rather than believe in the vision, they shut it down and just had the studio create games that were all independent of each other.
Considering Disney’s view towards Marvel at the time — before the MCU took off — it is no surprise that they were unwilling to majorly invest in a whole web of Marvel video games. In a recent interview, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos recalled how detached Disney used to be from the Marvel universe.
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“On our shows, we were dealing with the old Marvel television regime, which operated independently at Disney. And they were thrifty,” Sarandos told Variety. “Every time we wanted to make the shows bigger or better, we had to bang on them. Our incentives were not well aligned. We wanted to make great television; they wanted to make money. I though we could make money with great television.”
While it is interesting to think about a Marvel gaming universe, the fact that it never panned out may be for the best. The cost of video games has skyrocketed in recent years, and it seems unlikely that too many fans would shill out $60 plus per game to remain in the loop about the gaming universe. Even with all of Marvel’s content being available on Disney+, fans already have a hard time keeping up with the MCU, so the company decided to rework things to make access to the stories easier.
“There was a lot of pressure post-AVENGERS: ENDGAME on the public to feel obligated to watch absolutely everything in order to watch anything,” said Brad Winderbaum, Marvel’s head of streaming, television and animation, last year. “Part of the rebranding was a signal to the general audience that we’re creating a lot of options, and you can follow your tastes within this brand. Some will be more comedic, some will be more dramatic, some will be animated, some will be live-action. Marvel is more than just one thing — it is actually many different genres that just happened to coexist in a single narrative.”
READ MORE: MARVEL MAKES CHANGES TO PUT LESS ‘PRESSURE’ ON FANS
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