Marvel Reportedly Canceled an Open-World Iron Man Game 10 Years Ago

There aren't a lot of good Marvel games out there, but a handful of them are pretty well-made (i.e. Insomniac Games). Still, there's no solo game featuring Iron Man, even if he was in a terrible Avengers game. However, we might've gotten an open-world one as far back as ten years ago.

As reported by IGN, there was a canceled Iron Man game in the works being made by Avalance Studios - the guys behind the "Just Cause." It was supposed to be published by Sega, but Marvel and Disney stepped in and cancelled it after two years of development work. According to Avalanche co-founder Christofer Sundberg, the game would've allowed players to just "take off and fly anywhere."

There's even footage of the game posted recently on the MinnMax Twitter account:

In the footage, you can clearly see that the suit took inspiration from the MCU version of Tony Stark's armor. It's not clear whether this Iron Man game would've actually been an MCU tie-in, though, considering 2010 was the year "Iron Man 2" released. So the superhero franchise millions of people love today was still in relative infancy, and it looked like the game may have wanted to capitalize on that budding popularity.

It made sense for Disney and Marvel to tap the guys who made "Just Cause," because that franchise was pretty well-known for over-the-top action and great flying mechanics. They probably were the best people in the industry to do the job. But the main reason why it was canceled is because Disney apparently wanted to finish the game really, really quickly (via Kotaku).

In Sundberg's interview with MinnMax, he mentioned how the short development timeframe for the Iron Man game would've put Avalanche in complete shambles. Because to achieve Disney's timeline, they needed to hire 70-80 new people for the team, which wouldn't have been well-cared for as much.

Either way, Sundberg believed that the game could've been a great one, saying how "so many great people" were involved in making it.

What Would An Open-World Iron Man Game Be Like?

Fortunately for you, this question was already answered (in some way) by a developer working with Unreal Engine 5.

Created by developer Aaron Morse, his open-world Iron Man game demo was made using UE5's "Matrix Awakens" demo as its base (via Gaming Bible UK). According to Morse, he put together the demo just for fun and because of his love for the character, but it wasn't without challenges. Specifically, the demo is very hard to run even on a pretty powerful PC:

Nevertheless, he made the demo downloadable for free to all PC users - provided they have the right hardware to run it. The only drawbacks are the myriad of performance issues like frame rate drops and stutters, but that's something you'd expect from an unofficial, fan-made demo. But it's still pretty well-made, and it offers what could be the closest glimpse to what an official Iron Man game from Marvel and Disney would be like.

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Written by RJ Pierce