After having dominated the film space over the last decade and a half, Marvel has now set its sights on games, and while the results have already been impressive with releases like Marvel’s Spider-Man and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, it’s clear that there’s way, way more to come, with the likes of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Marvel’s Wolverine, EA’s recently-announced Iron Man game, and much more being in the works.
But where Marvel’s individual films and TV shows have fed back into a single, larger, connected universe, that’s not the approach that the company wants to take with its games. Speaking in an interview with GamesIndustry, when asked if we can expect Marvel to ultimately establish an MCU for games, VP and creative director of Marvel Games Bill Rosemann said that that’s not the framework the company has adopted, because it wants each new game to have the freedom to tell the story it wants to tell, without being creatively bound by having to adhere to events in other Marvel games by separate studios.
“The world is, amazingly, very familiar and accepting of the multiverse,” Rosemann said. “We have all these different realities. Now they’re all real, and we want to give everyone the freedom to tell their story. We don’t want to say ‘you can’t blow up the moon, because this game over here by another studio needs the moon’. We want to give everyone the freedom and the clear lane to tell their story.”
Given how radically different (and much more complicated) game development can be as compared to making movies, it’s not surprising – and ultimately clever – that Marvel is approaching its efforts in the gaming space differently. Of course, some might still be hoping that, at the very least, individual Marvel games from a single studio – like Spider-Man and Wolverine from Insomniac – might end up connecting together more strongly- but as it stands right now, it doesn’t seem like that’s something that the company is going for.
Of course, if you are looking for a connected universe in games, Alan Wake and Control developer Remedy Entertainment has you covered.