"Marvel Gaming Universe Concept Unveiled but Funding Falls Through"

The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has revolutionized the entertainment industry by weaving an intricate tapestry of interconnected films and TV shows. However, Marvel video games operate in a different realm, with each title presenting standalone stories that do not intersect. For instance, Insomniac's *Marvel's Spider-Man* series stands distinctly apart from Eidos-Montreal's *Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy*. Similarly, forthcoming titles like *Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra*, *Marvel's Wolverine*, and *Marvel's Blade* also lack any shared continuity.

Yet, there was once a vision at Disney to forge a Marvel Gaming Universe (MGU) that would mirror the MCU's success in the gaming world. This ambitious project, however, never came to fruition. So, what derailed this promising endeavor?

On *The Fourth Curtain* podcast, host Alexander Seropian and guest Alex Irvine, both of whom were involved in the MGU project, shed light on its fate. Seropian, a co-founder of Bungie known for *Halo* and *Destiny*, later led Disney's video game division before departing in 2012. Irvine, a seasoned writer for Marvel games, most recently contributed to the narrative and world-building of *Marvel Rivals*.

Irvine recounted the initial excitement surrounding the MGU concept: "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."

Seropian elaborated that the MGU was his brainchild, but it failed to secure the necessary funding from Disney's higher-ups: "When I was at Disney, that was my initiative, 'Hey, let’s tie these games together.' It was pre-MCU. But it didn’t get funded."

Irvine, who had previously worked on the innovative *Halo* alternate reality game *I Love Bees*, shared some of the innovative ideas they had for the MGU: "That was so frustrating because we came up with all these great ideas about how to do it. And I was coming out of ARGs at that point and thinking, 'Wouldn’t it be cool if we had some ARG aspects?' There would be a place where players could go that all the games touched, and we could move them back and forth from game to game. We could link in comics, we could loop in anything, we could do original stuff. And then, as Alex said, it didn’t get funded. So we made a bunch of games."

The complexity of the MGU concept may have been its undoing. Irvine suggested that the intricate questions about its relationship to Marvel's comics and movies might have deterred some at Disney: "Even back then, we were trying to figure out, 'If there’s going to be this MGU, how is it different from the comics? How is it different from the movies? How are we going to decide if it stays consistent?' And I think some of those questions got complex enough that there were people at Disney who didn’t really want to deal with them."

It's intriguing to ponder what might have been if the MGU had secured the funding to become a reality. Perhaps *Insomniac's Spider-Man* games would have shared a universe with Square Enix's *Marvel's Avengers* and *Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy*, featuring cross-title cameos and culminating in an epic, *Endgame*-style event.

Looking forward, there's curiosity about whether *Insomniac's Marvel's Wolverine* will share a universe with *Marvel's Spider-Man*. Could characters from the *Spider-Man* series make a cameo in *Wolverine*?

Alas, the MGU remains a missed opportunity in the annals of video game history. Yet, in another universe, perhaps it thrives as a reality.