Over the last few years, Marvel has tried to change how it operates its video game business. Instead of working in-house or offering exclusive licenses to specific publishers as it had in the past, the Marvel Games team now works on a game-by-game basis, taking pitches and granting licenses to studios across the industry.
This has resulted in major hits like Insomniac's Spider-Man series and the ongoing free-to-play mega-hit Marvel Rivals (whose Season 2 is reported to release sometime in April). However, it did not always work that way, and things could have looked much closer to Marvel Studios' MCU if Disney Interactive Studios' original gaming universe plan had come to fruition.
A Gaming MCU Was in the Works
It was recently revealed that Marvel would once try to do what it has done with the MCU but for its video games.
According to writer Alex Irvine and former Disney Interactive Studios Vice President of Game Development Alex Seropian, there were once plans for a gaming MCU, but it never came to be.
Irvine, who appeared on Seropian's gaming industry podcast The Fourth Curtain, detailed this idea of a Marvel Gaming Universe (MGU), divulging that when he "first started working on Marvel games," there was an idea for a "Marvel gaming universe that was going to exist:"
"When I first started working on Marvel games, there was this idea that they were going to create like a Marvel gaming universe that was going to exist in the same way that the MCU... And it never really happened, as you know."
Seropian chimed in to say, "When I worked at Disney, that was my initiative," detailing the MGU would see all of Marvel's games tied together in some way:
"When I worked at Disney, that was my initiative. It was, 'Hey let's tie these games together. It was pre-MCU, but it did not get funded."
Irvine elaborated, discussing elements from his past work that he wanted to bring to this MGU, including mention of ARGs (augmented reality games) that would see players potentially occupy "a place where players could go [and] all the games touched:"
"That was so frustrating, because we had all these ideas about how to do it. And 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 where 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."
However, Irvine reiterated what Seropian mentioned earlier. He said, "it did not get funded," so they made a bunch of not-connected games instead:
"We could do original stuff. And then, as Alex said, it did not get funded. So we made a bunch of games."
Marvel Avengers Alliance was the game that most prominently came out of this partnership between Irvine and the Marvel team. This 2012 turn-based social network game involves players creating an original SHEILD agent to level up and take into mission alongside some of Marvel's biggest heroes in a shared online space.
What Went Wrong With the Marvel Gaming Universe?
Knowing that something like the MCU can work, some may wonder why Marvel was less enthused about recreating this success in the gaming world.
According to Seropian, these initial conversations pre-dated the MCU. Even if talks continued into Phase 1 of the MCU, at that point, it was still too early to tell if the movie franchise would be the monolithic success it eventually became.
Irvine described the other factor at play, which was that there were too many questions to be answered. In the Fourth Curtain interview, Irvine explained everything they had to consider when building the framework for this potential MGU.
They asked things like, "How is going to be different from the comics," and, "How are we going to decide if it stays consistent?" Some of these questions got "complex enough that there were people at Disney that did not want to deal with it:"
"Even back then, we were trying to figure out, if there is going to be this MGU, how is going to be 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 that did not want to deal with it."
Connecting everything like Marvel has in the MCU is a herculean effort, done mainly within a single studio (Marvel Studios).
Incorporating multiple developers, publishers, platforms, and genres into an MGU would have complicated that process even further, and one can see why the powers that be opted to shut down conversations surrounding a connected gaming universe.
That has not stopped at least a sprinkling of this shared universe idea from making its way into Marvel games in recent years.
Characters like Yuri Lowenthal's Spider-Man from Insomniac Games' Spider-Man franchise have popped up elsewhere outside of his games, appearing in 2023's Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse movie.
And who knows what sort of Marvel Universe Easter eggs will be present in titles like the upcoming Wolverine PlayStation game?
Of course, this is not the same thing as an inter-connected continuity pushing and pulling a seamless narrative from game to game in a proper MGU, but it is as close as fans will get (at least for now).
Marvel's most recent video game, Marvel Rivals, is available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.
