It’s been a while since we’ve seen a game based on Marvel’s Iron Man, and it’s not for lack of trying. Marvel owner Disney had at one point tapped Just Cause series developer Avalanche Studios to create an original game based on the armoured superhero. That project was cancelled before it was even announced.
Now, an hour-long collection of videos showing gameplay from that cancelled Iron Man game has popped up online. The footage appeared on the GamingLeaksAndRumours subreddit, seemingly originating from “the same user that has GTA 5 build and Agent files”.
This open-world Iron Man game was in development for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in around 2012, and the footage supposedly comes from a build of the game running on a PS3 development kit.
The gameplay isn’t polished and there are a few unfinished assets, as is typical of in-development builds. We can, however, see similarities it shares with the Just Cause series, particularly in the fluidity of character movement and the overall game speed.
We get a good look at flying sequences, too, as well as hand-to-hand combat not dissimilar to the way Iron Man plays in Marvel’s Avengers, with both clearly inspired by the rhythmic flow of the Batman Arkham games.
One of the more interesting Iron Man videos shows what appears to be an E3 demo, featuring more focused gameplay segments clearly designed to show the game in the best light.
We only know about the cancelled Iron Man game’s existence thanks to a 2022 interview with former studio head Christofer Sundberg, who said it was terminated due to Disney’s decision to cut its development schedule by one year. Avalanche would have had to staff-up considerably to meet the tighter deadline, which Sundberg said “would have broken the studio completely”.
If there’s any silver lining in this story it’s the reminder that Iron Man makes for an exciting action game character, and someone is bound to find a way to make it work sooner or later. That someone might just be EA’s Motive Studio, which has been working on a single-player Iron Man game for years.
