The trailers for Marvel’s Avengers have already revealed their takes on Taskmaster and Abomination, but now we know the organization that’ll be pulling the strings behind the scenes. The news comes courtesy of the game’s official Twitter account, which revealed that:
“In the five years since the events of A-Day, a new evil threat has emerged: Advanced Idea Mechanics (A.I.M.). They believe that science, not Super Heroes, will save the world.”
A.I.M. will be familiar to both fans of the comics and the MCU. A Stan Lee and Jack Kirby creation, A.I.M. began life in World War II as an offshoot of HYDRA and are a loose network of spies, arms dealers and scientists who seek nothing less than world domination. In Iron Man 3, they initially appeared to be a legitimate technology company but eventually were found to be conducting sinister human experiments in an effort to seize control of the United States government.
It seems that they’re trying their old tactics in Marvel’s Avengers. After the A-Day event seen in the E3 trailer, it appears that public trust in the Avengers has been shaken, with A.I.M. stepping in to fill the void. I would imagine that over the course of the game A.I.M. will provide a steady stream of anonymous mooks to chew through as the various heroes, as well as recruiting some jobbing supervillains to act as bosses.
But that’s a pretty straightforward Avengers story, so fingers crossed there’s a little more to what’s going on than that. The fact that Captain America appears to die in the opening scenes of the game is certainly a departure, but given that we don’t see a body (and that he had fully developed combat mechanics), I’m betting he secretly survived that explosion.