Marvel Gaming Universe Concept Similar to MCU Proposed but Unfunded

The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has revolutionized the entertainment industry with its intricately woven tapestry of films and TV shows, creating a unified narrative that captivates audiences worldwide. In stark contrast, Marvel's video games operate independently, each telling its own unique story without any crossover. For instance, Insomniac's Marvel's Spider-Man series stands apart from Eidos-Montreal's Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy. Similarly, upcoming titles like Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra, Marvel's Wolverine, and Marvel's Blade also lack any shared universe elements.

However, there was once a vision at Disney to establish a Marvel Gaming Universe (MGU), mirroring the success of the MCU in the realm of video games. So, what led to the abandonment of this ambitious project?

On The Fourth Curtain podcast, host Alexander Seropian and guest Alex Irvine, both involved in the MGU project, shed light on its fate. Seropian, known for co-founding Bungie and developing Halo and Destiny, later led Disney's video game division until his departure in 2012. Irvine, a seasoned writer for Marvel games, contributed to the world-building and character development for Marvel Rivals.

Irvine reminisced about the initial concept of the MGU, stating, "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. It never really happened."

Seropian added that the MGU was his initiative during his tenure at Disney, but it failed to secure the necessary funding. "When I was at Disney, that was my initiative, 'Hey, let's tie these games together.' It was pre-MCU," Seropian explained. "But it didn't get funded."

Irvine, who had previously worked on the innovative Halo alternate reality game (ARG) I Love Bees, detailed how the MGU would have functioned. "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."

The complexity of integrating various media and maintaining consistency across games may have contributed to the MGU's downfall. Irvine noted, "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."

Imagining what could have been, one can envision a universe where Insomniac's Spider-Man games share a world with Square Enix's Marvel's Avengers and Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, featuring cross-game cameos and culminating in a grand, Endgame-like event.

Looking to the future, there's curiosity about whether Insomniac's upcoming Marvel's Wolverine game will share the same universe as its Spider-Man titles. Could there be potential for characters from the Spider-Man games to appear in Wolverine?

Ultimately, the MGU remains a fascinating "what if" scenario in the world of video games, a dream that never materialized but sparks the imagination of what could have been in another universe.