Avalanche Studios is best known for its work on the chaos simulator series called Just Cause. The studio had experience in open-world video game development and so was tasked with making an Iron Man game that never got to see the light of day.
The project had been worked on for around 2 years before getting canned. Avalanche’s co-founder Christofer Sundberg revealed the requirements from Disney and the tight development time that resulted in the cancellation.
Sundberg discussed this in an interview with MinnMax (via VGC), in which he discussed the company politics that caused the project to get trashed.
He talked about the main reason Avalanche Studios’ first real superhero game was canceled, which was the shortening development time. Disney was demanding numerous hirings to put the game out a year earlier than originally intended. Sundberg said that this would have required the studio to hire 70 to 80 people to a team. The main issue this would have resulted in is that once the Iron Man project was complete, Avalanche would have to quickly find another project to put the extra workforce on. All of this, considering the tight deadline, made it too daunting a task for the studio.
He said, “It would have broken the studio completely to do that.”
What Was Avalanche Studio’s Iron Man Game Like?
During the interview, Sundberg provided some details about what Avalanche Studio’s Iron Man project would have been like. He said that being Iron Man, flying would have been possible in the game, but the main focus was on melee combat and the ability to push other characters through walls.
When Ben Hanson (the interviewer from MinnMax) asked about how Iron Man adopted Rocksteady’s Batman Arkham Asylum style of combat, Sundberg said it would have been similar to Arkham Asylum, but with the ability to fly wherever you want. In the daylight, of course.
Even though the project will never make it to gamers’ hands, it could have been an interesting take on Iron Man. And with Marvel struggling with the current versions of Iron Man in video games, perhaps an open-world focused game would’ve done quite well.