Summary
- There were plans to create a connected Marvel Gaming Universe.
- Disney scrapped the idea due to multiple complexities.
- But then we got Marvel Rivals, so it all worked out.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe. Once the most ambitious crossover of all time, but now a thorn in the side of Marvel movies that are bogged down by continuity problems. There’s no denying that the MCU was one of the greatest things to happen to movies. But the connected universe peaked at Avengers: Endgame, and it’s mostly been downhill from there.
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Marvel Rivals Really Doesn’t Need Crossovers
There’s enough content to mine in Marvel alone. Why look elsewhere?
However, it seems that there was once even a plan to create a Marvel Gaming Universe, or MGU, if you will. A series of Marvel games spanning various genres but existing in the same timeline sounds like something Disney would want, but the truth is that it’s way more difficult to pull off than movies, and so it was scrapped.
There Was An Idea…
Speaking on an episode of The Fourth Curtain podcast (thanks, The Game Post), Marvel Rivals writer Alex Irvine revealed that there was once a plan to create an MGU, but Disney eventually scrapped the idea due to how difficult it would be to pull off. Multiple Marvel games would be tied to a singular timeline, much like the MCU.
“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,” said Irvine. Host Alex Seropian, who worked at Disney as SVP & GM of Core Games at the time chimed in, saying, “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.”
Of course making a video game is way more complicated than making a movie. Add to that a connected universe of multiple games, and it might be too much for any developer to handle.
“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,” explained Irvine.
