In 2008, Marvel started the Marvel Cinematic Universe with the release of Iron Man. But prior to that, DIsney was once pitched a video game version of the MCU which it, unfortunately, turned down.
On an episode of The Fourth Curtain Podcast, host Alexander Seropian and his guest Alex Irvine recalled their plan for a connected universe for future Marvel games, an amazing concept that Disney's higher-ups ultimately passed up on.
“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,” said Irvine, a longtime writer of Marvel games, including most recently Marvel Rivals. “It never really happened.”
Alexander Seropian, a former VP of Game Development for DIsney Interactive Studios, revealed that the MGU (Marvel Game Universe) was his "initiative," but revealed that it never got funded by Disney execs.
“When I was at Disney, that was my initiative, ‘Hey, let’s tie these games together.’ It was pre-MCU,” Seropian said. “But it didn’t get funded.”
The idea itself sounds pretty amazing, and irvine, who had worked on the Halo alternate reality game (ARG) I Love Bees while at Bungie, detailed how the MGU would've worked.
“That was so frustrating because we came up with all these great ideas about how to do it,” he said. “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 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, as Alex said, it didn’t get funded. So we made a bunch of games.”
Irvine suggested that the idea sounded too complex for Disney executives to wrap their heads around, which is probably what turned them off from the idea.
“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,” Irvine explained.
It's no longer hard to imagine how an MGU would work now that the MCU has sort of laid the groundwork, but back then those questions were probably pretty daunting. Although we don't have a Marvel Game Universe, Marvel fans have been treated to quite a few critically acclaimed gems, including Insomniac's Marvel's Spider-Man game. Square Enix's Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy was also another underapprecated title, that unfortunately didn't sell as well as the publisher would've hoped.
Now that we know about the original plans for the MGU, it begs the question if Insomniac Games will try something similar. They've already established Spider-Man and Miles Morales, but they are currently working on Marvel's Wolverine. Will it be set in the same universe as the Spider-Man games, and possibly even feature some characters from those games?