Avalanche Studios, the developers behind the hit series Just Cause, were reportedly working on an Iron Man game for two years. The project was ultimately cancelled during the development stage due to “company politics”.
Christofer Sundberg, the co-founder of Avalanche Studios, discussed the cancellation of their Iron Man game with MinnMax in a recent interview (as spotted by VGC). Sundberg stated that the game was in development for around two years before it was cancelled. When asked why exactly the project didn’t see the light of day, he replied saying it was due to “company politics”.
He expands on his statement by saying that it was a “mess” by the end. According to Sundberg, Disney wanted to shorten the development time by increasing the budget that Avalanche Studios had to work with. “We would have to hire 70/80 people to a team, that I would have had the responsibility to find a new project for. But the development time was shortened down so much, so it was impossible, it would have broken the studio completely if we had agreed to that”, Sundberg said.
When it is pointed out that not many studios would complain about having their budget increased, Sundberg replies by saying “yes, but at the end of the project when the team is scaling down, that’s when you have to find a new project. And with one year of development time cut from the plan, that means I had one year less to find a new project for a big development team, which would have been impossible”.
The project was in development over 10 years ago, so Sundberg’s recollection of the project is naturally a little hazy. However, he did point out that the game would have had a heavy focus on melee combat, as well as the classic Iron Man features such as being able to use all of his weapons and being able to fly.
It’s not all bad news for Marvel fans though, as a recent rumor suggests that EA is currently in the process of creating a single-player Iron Man game, as well as a single-player Black Panther title.
