In 2010, Disney awarded Avalanche Studios the rights to develop an open world Iron Man game. In 2012, the dream of the Iron Man game was killed when Avalanche Studios announced that after two years in development, the game was canceled. At the time, there wasn’t a lot of information as to why the game died in development. Fast forward to 2022 and Christofer Sundber, Co-Founder of Avalanche Studios (left in 2020), spoke with MinnMax about the ill-fated game.
After over a decade of mystery, Sundber stated the reason the Iron Man game was canceled was due to company politics, stating, “very messy project that could have been really, really good.” Along with company politics, an increasing budget, development time cut, and needing to hire 70-80 more employees – developing the game became a challenge financially that the studio wasn’t willing to make. Sundber would go on to state, “It was painful because so much time and energy had been spent on it and it looked absolutely amazing. So that was the toughest part seeing a year and a half or two years of work — really hard work and really fun work, too, that really showed off in the build — just went down the toilet.”
Iron Man previously was featured in two Sega-developed games Iron Man (2008) and Iron Man 2 (2010). Iron Man was not well received and was even called the “Worst Game Everyone Played” by GameSpot. The sequel, Iron Man 2, didn’t fare well either with GameSpot stating “every decent element is overshadowed by stumbles and shortcomings,” and described it as “crashing to earth with a dull thud.” Empire Magazine called it “a rare failure for Sega.” Could Avalanche Studios’ open world Iron Man game change the legacy of failure for Iron Man games? The world will never know.
Image from: Marvel
