Earlier this week, Andrew Borman – a Digital Games Curator at the Museum of Play in Rochester, New York – uploaded never-before-seen footage of a cancelled Avengers game on his Twitter account. The project, partially developed by THQ’s Australia team, was meant to release around the same time the original Avengers film hit theaters in 2012. That is, before it got cancelled.
The title, which was intended to be a first-person co-op multiplayer experience, appears to have had no connection to the now-acclaimed pic whatsoever, as the art style, as well as character and environmental designs are radically different from the groundbreaking superhero blockbuster we know and love today.
I can't say this was something I expected to see this week, early and broken or not. #avengersassemble pic.twitter.com/IrjMEYJ3nT
— Andrew Borman (@Borman18) June 1, 2020
Nor was the story going to resemble the plot of the film. According to Borman, who’s shared footage of numerous cancelled video games in the past, THQ’s Avengers was going to be based on the Secret Invasion plotline from the comics, which sees Iron Man, Captain America, Thor and the Hulk face off against the shape-shifting Skrulls that appeared in 2019’s Captain Marvel.
“This is footage from an early build of THQ’s The Avengers, running on Xbox 360,” the description of Borman’s extended YouTube video reads. “It was recovered from a harddrive over on ObscureGamers, and is missing many of the files that may have once been included, if they ever made it to an Xbox 360 build.”
Although a game based on the renowned superhero team didn’t come to fruition during the previous decade, that doesn’t mean we’ll never see one. On the contrary, Japanese developer Square Enix, alongside its European subdivision Crystal Dynamics, is currently putting the finishing touches on their own Avengers title, an action-adventure single-player game that will allow people to crawl into the skins of each of their favorite heroes.
Published: Jun 4, 2020 08:26 pm