Ever since Marvel Studios became a fully functioning independent production house for major feature films with Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk, Marvel’s brand appeal and importance in contemporary pop culture has skyrocketed, leading to this year’s film industry success story in The Avengers.
The merchandise, the movies, and the comics they’re based on are everywhere, and the buzz couldn’t be more positive, with so much more on the horizon. On the video game side of things however, Marvel – and their parent company Disney – haven’t yet taken advantage of their franchises and Marvel Comics library of thousands of characters.
From awful licensed movie tie-ins for all of the “Phase One” movie films, including Thor: God of Thunder and Iron Man 1 & 2, to terrible adaptations including Silicon Knights’ flop X-Men: Destiny, developers have consistently failed for years and years to offer a triple-A Marvel video game experience.
The Marvel Universe MMO was canceled years ago, and so was THQ’s The Avengers game. What we have now are mobile games for smartphones, a Facebook game, a Kinect fighter by Ubisoft and the kids-focused Super Hero Squad Online. Not the stuff of best of year or most anticipated lists, and certainly nothing that warrants consideration come awards season.
Thankfully, Gazillion – who have an exclusive development deal with Marvel – are deep into production on the free-to-play Diablo clone Marvel Heroes, and Activision hopes to make up for their latest two Spider-Man games with next year’s Deadpool.
The jury is still out on these, and so while we hope for bigger and better things from the future of Marvel Games, there is still a lot to look back on, including what almost was another Marvel fighter came from Electronic Arts.
During the 2000s, Marvel and EA had a deal and out of it came the fighting game Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects. There was another game in development though, another fighter in the works at EA Chicago, the team behind the Def Jam series.
An artist working on that game released some artwork from it, and while it shows nothing of gameplay, it does offer a glimpse at some of the main characters involved, including Hulk, Spider-Man and Captain America. It also depicts a unique cel-shaded comic book aesthetic.
For whatever reason it didn’t come to be and the EA deal expired. We instead have the latest Marvel vs. Capcom game and fans of the genre can’t complain about that one. Even as a half-Marvel game, MvC 3 still one of the best games sporting the Marvel logo in years.
Still, with decades and decades of lore to build from, why aren’t we getting kick-ass Marvel superhero games in the vein of Batman: Arkham City?
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Follow Rob on Twitter @rob_keyes.
Source: Siliconera
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I think the reason we haven’t seen any amazing games was stated in this article: “Aweful licensed movie tie-ins”. If you look back to the Spider-Man game for the N64, it was actually amazing for its time (throwing webs into the sky and having them latch onto something above the rooftops was odd and nonsensical, however). The problem seems to be that everyone wants to cash in on the success of the Marvel movies, and making a truly good game that has more to stand on than the crutch of the ‘Marvel’ label has taken a back seat.
Arkham Asylum, Arkham City deviated from the comics and already present storylines enough to allow the creators major artistic freedom while staying true to the characters. If a Marvel game followed suit, then we’d get a triple-A Marvel game, every game I’ve seen however, tries to follow or at least tie-into one of the comic storylines, so the ending’s already set-in-stone, which leaves the direction much more limited.
There have been a couple of good Marvel Games, Hulk Ultimate Destruction and Spider Man 2 come to mind but in order to make a game properly you need artistic freedom and the time to do it properly. Just because the marvel movie craze is in full swing does not mean that it translates to video games, and if anything it probably hurts it.
Marvel Ultimate Alliance was amazing. 4 player coop RPG with pretty deep customization and long story line and great gameplay… what happened to that? They made a terrible sequel which had like 10% of the depth of the original.
XMen ORigins WOlverine was also awesome. BRutal action, lots of blood etc.
LOVED X-Men Origins: Wolverine – it was better than the film.
Also played the heck out of X-Men Legends 1 & 2 and Marvel Ultimate Alliance 1 & 2 but three of those were previous console generation.
This comment was exactly what I was looking for as I scrolled to this section – they need to give the people what they want – Marvel Ultimate Alliance was fantastic – I still play #2 on my PS3.
…and there has been exactly ONE game that makes you feel like Wolverine, even in the slightest – and that was X-Men Origins Wolverine. (Awful movie, great game).
I think the Ultimate Alliance 2 was pretty terrible when compared to the first. New developer, each hero only had 1 extra costume that did not affect stats, each hero only had 4 powers and no choice of button allignments, and you pretty much unlocked all powers at level 10. Which pretty much meant there was nothing to do in the game after few hours.
In the first, you could have different heroes doing specific roles, buffs/debuffs, you had loot, generic and also hero-specific, the main game was 40 hours long… not to mention you could play it with 3 other friends on the couch. It was pretty much fantastic and I can not believe they haven’t made a new game like Ultimate Alliance or X-Men Legends since.
And yeah, Wolverine Origins Uncaged, and Ultimate Alliance 1 were both made by Raven, who really knew what they were doing and they loved Marvel franchises. Wolverine game was brutal, bloody and over-the-top, just like Wolverine should be.
Too bad they are now stuck doing Activision stuff… i.e. Call of Duty DLC.
I dunno if anyone played the Captain America: Super Soldier game but I thought it was actually pretty cool. But we really need more Marvel games. So disappointed we didn’t get a (non-Kinect) Avengers game.
It was. And Ubisoft, hand the Avengers license to someone who’ll treat it right. After seeing that concept video for that avengers game…that’s what we got? Such wasted potential!
The Cap game wasn’t bad actually. It was way too easy though – made it a play & forget title.
So the guy at the end of the 15 second movie is wearing a Superman t-shirt O_o
OH MY GOD!SO THIS WAS THE GAME THAT GOT CANCELLED!WHAT A SHAME!!!