In September, Electronic Arts announced that a singleplayer Iron Man game was in pre-production. That game, which is being developed by a team at EA Motive in Montreal in collaboration with Marvel, is now officially being worked on, as a recent AMA on Reddit (opens in new tab) (via GamesRadar (opens in new tab)) revealed.
While the team responsible for the well-received Dead Space remake (we gave it an 84 in our review) will get to “take a well deserved vacation before determining what’s next,” the u/DeadSpace Devs account wrote, “We have an amazing team at Motive that has started working on Iron Man and you you [sic] can rest assured that it’s in great hands!”
According to Motive’s careers page (opens in new tab), the studio is currently looking for a development director, senior gameplay programmer, AI programmer, and an audio programmer for Iron Man. Presumably it’s still in the earliest stages of production then.
EA described it as a “third-person, action adventure” with “an original narrative that taps into the rich history of Iron Man, channeling the complexity, charisma, and creative genius of Tony Stark, and enabling players to feel what it’s like to truly play as Iron Man.” It sounds deliberately placed as far from Marvel’s Avengers as it could possibly get, maybe aiming for more of an Arkham Asylum feel.
Development is led by Olivier Proulx, who was senior producer on Eidos-Montreal’s Guardians of the Galaxy, which was a fun example of the kind of prestige game where you spend a lot of time sliding down things and figuring out how to open doors while the characters banter engagingly. (We gave it a Best Characters award in 2021.) Proulx was also lead producer of the singleplayer campaign in Marvel’s Avengers, and before that a producer on Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.
We recently got to spend plenty of time with the Shellhead in Marvel’s Midnight Suns, where he starts out pretty obnoxious but by the end of my playthrough became an absolute beast on the battlefield. He got some great lines in the Forge too, I mean “Tony’s Spooky Demon Cave,” and any new Iron Man videogame’s going to have to compete with that portrayal. It’ll also be in competition with how much fun it is playing Iron Man in GTA 5.
A new Iron Man game would be the perfect time to bring back that weird mouse that looked like Iron Man’s shrunken head. Make it happen, someone.
