Marvel has released some incredible games over the years and some that are not so incredible. We got to try our hands out on Insomniac Game’s Spider-Man Remastered for the PC, and it’s the best web-swinging game to date with its beautiful animations, ray-traced lighting bouncing off the cityscapes along, with 4K visuals. But then there are games like Marvel’s Avengers, which was a poor interpretation of Marvel heroes and specifically Iron Man, for that matter.
Iron Man Game in the works by Just Cause Developers Got Cancelled Ten Years Ago!
We got to experience a few Iron Man games for the PS2 and the PS3. Although the games were pretty impressive at the time, but looking back, the games haven’t aged that well. You’d get to explore different maps and complete missions while flying around the sky, which was pretty fun at the time, don’t get me wrong. Then we got to try out Iron Man VR for the PS4, which was a pretty solid experience. It was fun, but it wasn’t anything groundbreaking or exciting as you got to play as Iron Man for a few hours, and that was pretty much it. It was yesterday when the bad news broke out for Marvel Fans. We got to learn that Avalanche Studios was working on an Iron Man game ten years ago. The developers of Just Cause were gearing up for the development of the game and it was cancelled after a whole two years due to company politics. Just Cause has been a solid video game franchise. It didn’t change the video game industry but it did provide players with some fun and exciting things to do with its awesome gameplay mechanics and vast open world. We could have possibly gotten our hands on an open-world Iron Man game where players would navigate different cities and biomes, but the game was ultimately cancelled. The news came about as a part of a MinnMax Interview with the co-founder of Avalanche, Christofer Sundberg, who revealed that the Just Cause developer’s over at Stockholm Studio were working closely with Disney on an Iron Man game before it ended up being cancelled. Sunberg stated that it was a mess at the end of its life. The game’s development time shortened drastically, and the budget of the game ballooned as well. This meant that the developers of Just Cause over at Avalanche Studios had to hire a team of an extra seventy to eighty people in order to finish the game before it was cancelled by the orders of Disney. The Iron Man game would have completely broken down the company as Sundberg stated that they would go out of business if the developers of Just Cause kept working on the Iron Man game, so ultimately it had to be cancelled. Sunberg didn’t go that in-depth into the whole matter about how the game would have played out, how the gameplay was oriented or if it was in production for the PS4 and Xbox One. He did go on to say that there went a lot of time and effort by the Just Cause developers into Iron Man’s melee combat, as well as a focus on Iron Man’s repulsor gloves before the game was cancelled. In addition, he noted that you had the option to do things like takedown enemies through walls. If you think about it, that sounds quite akin to the combat system of Arkham Asylum, but the Iron Man game would have a bigger focus on environment destructibility which is pretty on point for the studio responsible for the Just Cause franchise. The early 2010s were a pretty bright time for superhero games if we look back. In the waking success of the Iron Man films, Sega worked with multiple developers to put out some nostalgically fun but actually terrible tie-in games. In case you didn’t know, Sega also worked with the company that would later change its name to Behaviour Interactive, the company behind Dead by Daylight. Noting that Sega was working with Avalanche on Renegade Ops in that time frame, it’s possible that the publisher tried to salvage whatever goodwill remained to get Avalanche back on board for the Iron Man franchise after countless ugly misses. Sundberg went on to say that it was hard for him and the developers of Just Cause to see two hard years of work on the Iron Man game go down the toilet due to Disney’s decision to cancel the game. He did state that the termination of the project didn’t account for any layoffs, which was pretty normal for the company back in 2008. Sundberg also stated that so much time and effort went into the game, and it was turning out absolutely amazing. He still hopes that an ambitious Iron Man game finally sees the light of the day at some point in time. For now, I hope that a former member of the team finds an old build of the game on their storage drives and puts it out in the world for everyone to see.
So, What’s Next?
But it seems unlikely that a ten year old Iron Man game will rise from the ashes. Disney is pretty trigger happy with their lawsuits and the developers of Just Cause most probably had to sign a non-disclosure agreement as to not reveal key information about the cancelled Iron Man game, which could explain why we were kept in the dark for over ten years. An Iron Man game backed by the developers responsible for Just Cause’s ridiculous and over the top action and destructability surely would have been interesting. Surely, the Marvel franchise has been oversaturated with content such as movies, shows, and games, whether for consoles or mobile phones, but back in 2012, it would have been a pretty unique experience to enjoy Iron Man with Just Cause-level environmental destruction paired with a combat system akin to Arkham Asylum. If you still yearn for a next-generation Iron Man experience, you can check out the tech demo crafted by Aaron Morse Wayne which is popular on the internet as the Iron Man Unreal Engine 5 Tech Demo. The tech demo game allows you to explore and fly in a wide open cityscape as Iron man, with his iconic thrusters supporting you. You can check it out right here, if you’re itching for a fix. And that’s pretty much it for the story on the Iron Man game that was in development by Just Cause Developers as it got cancelled by Disney. Would you like another Iron Man game? Let us know in the comments below. We upload daily on Appuals, so stay tuned for more. Till then, see you later and goodbye!
