"Marvel Gaming Universe" Was Once Pitched At Disney, But Didn't Get Funded

Disney once had some plans to create a Marvel Gaming Universe, which would connect all the Marvel video games in one cohesive timeline, similar to what the Marvel Cinematic Universe does for movies. However, those ideas never came to fruition, according to some industry insiders.

On the latest episode of The Fourth Curtain podcast, Alex Irvine, writer of NetEase's superhero team-based PVP shooter Marvel Rivals and host Alexander Seropian, former SVP & GM of Core Games at Disney, discussed the scrapped idea.

When talking about how it goes to work with a partner like Marvel, Irvine brought it up (around the 7-minute-30-second mark), "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." 

That would work like a place where players could move back and forth between different games, linking them with ARG (Alternate Reality Game) elements and even connecting to Marvel comics. Irvine gave more information about the exciting idea, saying, "We could link in comics, we could loop in anything, we could do original stuff."

This cool concept sounds "familiar" to Seropian, as it turned out to be his initiative to tie these games together. However, it didn't get funded, which makes Irvine feel frustrated because they "came up with all these great ideas about how to do it."

Although in the end, Disney chose to focus on singular games instead, some Marvel games still thrived, such as Insomniac's Spider-Man 2, which was ported to PC to unfortunate "Mixed" reviews in January this year, and Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, the 2021 third-person action-adventure developed by Eidos Montreal.