A new interview sheds light on Just Cause developer Avalanche Studio’s canceled open-world Iron Man game, rumored to be in the works a decade ago before getting axed in 2012.
MinnMax’s Ben Hanson interviewed Christofer Sundberg, co-founder of Avalance, who has since left the studio to start a new company, Liquid Sword. During the interview, Hansen asked Sundberg about the fate of the Iron Man project, which Sundberg revealed as being in development for a year and a half to two years before being canceled due to what he describes as “company politics.”
Sundberg reveals that Disney wanted Avalanche to rapidly expand its staff to finish the game under a shortened development timeline. However, he refused, explaining that doing so would have put a massive strain on the studio.
“It was, I was a mess by the end,” says Sundberg. “Shortening development time, increasing budgets. We would have to hire 70-80 people to the team that I would have had the responsibility to find a new project for, but the development time was shortened down so much. It would have broken the studio completely if we agreed to that.”
He continues by saying, “At the end of a project, when the team is scaling down, that’s when you find [a] new project. With one year of development time cut from the original plan, I had one year less to find a new project for a big development team which would have been impossible. And hiring all those developers would have been a nightmare. So it was for the best”
As far as Sundberg remembers, the game was disassociated from the Marvel Cinematic Universe and not tied to Iron Man 3, which was in production at that time. He says the game would have allowed players to “just take off and fly anywhere” and that it had a big focus on melee combat where players could punch characters through walls using Iron Man’s repulsors.
The clip is a nice bit of closure given that Hanson, formerly of Game Informer, previously asked Sundberg about the project during an interview for our Just Cause 3 cover story in 2014. At the time, Sundberg acknowledged the cancellation of an unannounced Marvel game but wouldn’t confirm the rumors that it was Iron Man-related. So now we know.
Be sure to watch MinnMax’s full interview with Christofer Sundberg here, where he discusses his new studio’s first project, creating the Mad Max game, and more.