Marvel Gaming Universe Plan Shelved After Funding Fails

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has risen to dominate pop culture by weaving its films and TV shows into a long-form, cohesive narrative. Marvel video games, however, operate in separate silos, telling stories that are entirely unconnected. For instance, Insomniac's Marvel's Spider-Man series shares no continuity with Eidos-Montreal's Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy. Upcoming titles like Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra, Marvel's Wolverine, and Marvel’s Blade similarly stand alone.

Yet, there was once a concept at Disney to build a Marvel Gaming Universe (MGU), aiming to replicate the MCU's successful interconnected model for video games. So why did this ambitious plan never come to fruition?

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On The Fourth Curtain podcast, host Alexander Seropian and guest Alex Irvine, both of whom worked on the MGU concept, discussed the initiative and revealed why it was ultimately shelved.

Seropian, a co-founder of Bungie (creator of Halo and Destiny), later led Disney's video game division until 2012. Irvine is a veteran writer for Marvel games, most recently contributing world-building, dialogue, and character backstories for the popular title Marvel Rivals.

Reflecting on his earlier projects, Irvine opened up about the abandoned MGU plan.

"When I began working on Marvel games, there was a vision to establish a Marvel gaming universe that would mirror the MCU's approach," Irvine recalled. "It just never materialized."

Seropian clarified that the MGU was his "brainchild," but it failed to secure funding from Disney's executives.

"During my tenure at Disney, that was my proposal: 'Let's connect these games into a shared world.' This was before the MCU took off," Seropian said. "But the funding never came through."

Irvine, who previously worked on Bungie's acclaimed Halo alternate reality game (ARG) *I Love Bees*, elaborated on how the MGU would have functioned.

"It was incredibly frustrating because we had developed all these fantastic ideas for execution," he said.

"Coming from an ARG background, I thought, 'Wouldn't it be great to incorporate some ARG elements?' We imagined a central hub that all games would connect to, allowing players to transition between titles. We could integrate comics, other media, and create original content. But as Alex mentioned, it wasn't funded. So, we just made individual games instead."

What prevented the MGU from gaining internal support? Irvine speculated that the concept grew overly complex, deterring key decision-makers at Disney.

"Even back then, we struggled with questions like, 'How will the MGU differ from the comics or the movies? How do we maintain consistency?' Some of these issues became so complicated that certain people at Disney simply didn't want to tackle them," Irvine explained.

It's intriguing to imagine an alternate reality where the MGU received the necessary funding. Perhaps Insomniac's Spider-Man would have shared a universe with Square Enix's Marvel's Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy, with characters crossing over and storylines building toward a climactic, Endgame-scale event.

Looking forward, this raises questions about Insomniac's upcoming Marvel's Wolverine. Will it be set in the same world as Marvel's Spider-Man? Could we see Spider-Man or other characters from those games make a cameo appearance?

For now, the Marvel Gaming Universe remains another "what if" in video game history. Although, somewhere in a parallel universe, it might just be a reality...