In the ’60s, Marvel popularized the idea of a connected universe around several comics. Then, Marvel did the same thing with their animated shows in the ’90s. And of course, Marvel Studios changed the movie business with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. On a recent episode of The Fourth Curtain Podcast, (via IGN), we learned there was also an idea for a Marvel Gaming Universe, that would tie all the Marvel video games together. Alas, it never happened. Alex Irvine, one of the minds behind the mega-popular Marvel Rivals, once pitched the idea of an “MGU.” Here’s what he said about the proposed Marvel Gaming Universe to The Fourth Curtain Podcast host Alexander Seropian:
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. That was so frustrating because we came up with all these great ideas about how to do it.
Alex Irvine added “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 seems it all got way too complex for the suits to know how to work out the legal kinks to make this a reality.
In the end, there were probably way too many fingers in way too many pies for this to ever happen. Insomniac did the Spider-Man games for example, while Square Enix did Marvel’s Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy. The legality of it all would have been a nightmare. It’s not unlike how making an MCU would have been impossible in the early 2000s, when so many different studios had the rights to the bulk of the Marvel characters. Even when the MCU launched, they had to do it without their “Big Guns,” Spider-Man and the X-Men. Still, who knows what the future holds. One day, an MGU might happen. No one thought Marvel and DC would ever cross over again, and it’s now happening. So keep your fingers crossed, superhero fans. Stranger things have happened.