The traditional thinking back then - and even today - was that licensed video games should be third-person. "It was like a bomb going off," says Henden.Ī first-person superhero game. It wasn't quite as abrupt as that, Dailey says, but regardless: It wasn't a popular decision at first.
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"I said, 'Fuck it', let's make it first-person." So he made a big call with huge ramifications for the Avengers project. Games like this, relying on brand name over quality, rarely got the time or attention required to create a truly polished superhero experience.ĭailey wanted to do something different. There were some good games, admits Dailey, like Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, but third-person action games directly tied to Marvel movies had traditionally been rushed out the door to hit release dates.
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"Every Marvel movie tie that had come and gone at that point was like this third-person kind of cookie-cutter clone." "I was looking at what was out there," remembers Dailey. Upon arriving, Dailey spent his first month at THQ Studio Australia getting an idea of where the game was headed and how he could contribute.
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"With THQ," Henden explains, "you never really knew whether you were in the good books or the bad books as a studio." But those sorts of conflicts rarely filtered down the chain. It was common knowledge that the then-general manager of THQ Studio Australia, Steve Middleton, was often at odds with THQ corporate. Levels were beginning to take shape with the help of some beautiful environment art. It was six months of "solid work," remembers Henden. That meant single-player, third-person action featuring weighty, close-quarters combat. THQ Studio Australia didn't want to make an Iron Man, it wanted to make a Batman: Arkham Asylum, and, in the beginning, much of the design work reflected that. Iron Man scored an abysmal 45% on Metacritic and won GameSpot's "Worst Game Everyone Played" award that year. Like Iron Man, a Sega title rushed through production to hit the movie's release date in 2008. But it was the exception that proved the rule: Most video games based on comic books or movies were bad. In 2009, the benchmark for comic book video games was Batman: Arkham Asylum, a polished third-person action game with slickly integrated puzzles and exploration elements. Everyone working on the game would ultimately lose their jobs.Ī global financial crisis, a surging Australian dollar, a licensing deal that all but guaranteed it would never return a profit: The Avengers was a video game caught at the center of a dozen competing hurricanes.Īnd despite the best efforts of everyone involved, it was ultimately torn apart. They worked as though their careers and livelihoods depended on it.īut despite being an innovative, high-quality video game that wowed almost everyone who played it, the Avengers project would never see the light of day.
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This was a huge deal, and everyone on the team knew it.
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Avengers would ultimately become bigger than Star Wars, bigger than Harry Potter, bigger than anything. In 2012, Marvel and Disney were set to release the first Avengers movie, launching a franchise that would change cinema forever. The THQ Studio Australia team had a reputation for creating licensed video games within tight time frames. But in a universe where crushing work hours are normalized and outrageous behavior is commonplace, this time the stakes were even higher than usual.