AVALANCHE STUDIOS’ CO-FOUNDER SAYS DISNEY’S DEMANDS WOULD HAVE “BROKEN” THEM
Avalanche Studios, the studio behind Just Cause, spent two years developing an Iron Man game before it was shelved, according to Christofer Sundberg, a co-founder of the firm.
In an interview with MinnMax, Sundberg—who left Avalanche in 2019 to start a new studio called Liquid Swords—discussed the abandoned project.
After a few years of production, he said the open-world game was canceled in 2012 because of “corporate politics.”
Disney and Marvel apparently wanted Avalanche to hire more people fast so that the game could be finished sooner than anticipated, but Sundberg claimed that doing so would have “destroyed the studio totally.”
It was, he admitted, and by the end, I was a mess. “It seemed like, we would have to employ 70 or 80 individuals to the team, cutting down on development time and budget, for which I would have been in charge of finding a new project.
But because the development time was cut so drastically, it was impossible to do. If we had agreed to that, the studio would have entirely collapsed.
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”.
Sundberg claimed that despite allowing players to “take off and fly anywhere,” the game placed a strong emphasis on melee combat, such as punching enemies through walls using Iron Man’s repulsors.
A trustworthy industry insider recently asserted that Electronic Arts may be developing a standalone Iron Man game in addition to an unknown Black Panther 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”.
