Disney Once Planned a Connected Marvel Gaming Universe (MGU), But It Never Happened

Marvel movies and TV shows are all part of a shared world known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). However, Marvel’s video games tell their own separate stories, with no connection between them.

For example, Marvel’s Spider-Man by Insomniac Games has no link to Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy from Eidos-Montreal. Upcoming titles like Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra, Marvel’s Wolverine, and Marvel’s Blade are also completely independent from one another.

But things could have been very different. At one point, Disney considered creating a Marvel Gaming Universe (MGU), which would have tied all Marvel games together in the same way the MCU connects its movies.

The MGU was first mentioned by Alex Irvine and Alexander Seropian on The Fourth Curtain podcast. Both were involved in the project before it was ultimately scrapped.

Irvine, who has written for multiple Marvel games, explained how the idea first started:

“When I first started working on Marvel games, there was this idea that they were going to create a Marvel gaming universe that was going to exist in the same way that the MCU did, It never really happened.”

Seropian, who co-founded Bungie (Halo, Destiny) and later managed Disney’s video game division, revealed that he had been leading the initiative. However, the project failed to receive the necessary funding.

“When I was at Disney, that was my initiative, ‘Hey, let’s tie these games together.’ It was pre-MCU,” he said. “But it didn’t get funded.”

Irvine shared some of the early concepts that were developed for the MGU: “That was so frustrating because we came up with all these great ideas about how to do it,” he said.

One of the key ideas involved using an alternate reality game (ARG) system to link different titles. Players would have had a shared space where all the games connected, allowing them to move between experiences.

“And I was coming out of ARGs at that point and thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we had some ARG aspects?’ There would be a place where players could go that all the games touched, and we could move them back and forth from game to game. We could link in comics, we could loop in anything, we could do original stuff.”

This approach would have allowed different Marvel game characters to interact, making the universe feel alive and connected.

Despite all the exciting ideas, the MGU never got past the planning stage. According to Irvine, the concept became too complicated, which may have discouraged Disney from moving forward.

“Even back then, we were trying to figure out, ‘If there’s going to be this MGU, how is it different from the comics? How is it different from the movies? How are we going to decide if it stays consistent?’ And I think some of those questions got complex enough that there were people at Disney who didn’t really want to deal with them,” he explained.

The complexity of keeping multiple games consistent in a shared universe might have been too difficult to manage, leading Disney to abandon the idea.

If the MGU had been funded, the Marvel video game world would look very different today. Games like Marvel’s Spider-Man and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy could have existed in the same universe, with characters making cameo appearances or even sharing major storylines. There could have been an Avengers: Endgame-style event in gaming, bringing different heroes together.

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