A cancelled Iron Man game from the studio behind Just Cause has been revealed

Just Cause developer Avalanche Studios was working on an Iron Man game for two years before it was cancelled, company co-founder Christofer Sundberg has revealed.

Sundberg, who left Avalanche in 2019 to form a new studio called Liquid Swords, discussed the aborted project during an interview with MinnMax.

He said the open-world title was cancelled around 2012, following a couple of years in development, due to “company politics.”

Disney and Marvel reportedly wanted Avalanche to staff up rapidly in order to complete the game more quickly than originally planned, but Sundberg said agreeing to do so would have “broken the studio completely”.

“It was, I was a mess by the end,” he said. “It was like, shortening development time, increasing budget, we would have to hire 70 or 80 people to the 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 to do. It would have broken the studio completely if we had agreed to that.”

He elaborated: “At the end of a project when the team is scaling down, that’s when you have to find a new project, and with that one year of development time cut from the original plan, it would mean that I had one year less to find a new project for a big development team which would have been impossible, and hiring all those developers would have been a complete nightmare, so it was for the best.”

Sundberg went on to describe the game as “a very messy project that could have been really, really good”.

While the game would have enabled players to “take off and fly anywhere”, Sundberg said it had a heavy focus on melee combat, such as using Iron Man’s repulsors to punch characters through walls.

It was recently claimed by a reputable industry insider that Electronic Arts could be making a single-player Iron Man game, in addition to an unannounced Black Panther game.

Related

1

Amy Hennig’s Marvel game will be shown in September at D23

The company will show a 'sneak peek' at a new Marvel ensemble game

Sundberg’s new studio, Liquid Swords, is currently developing a AAA game with Unreal Engine 5.

The studio’s website describes it as “a connected single player action RPG” and “a hard-boiled take on the open-world crime genre”.