I am TONY STARK… and my brassy crimson pantaloons may have sprung a few leaks. A work-in-progress trailer for Marvel’s Iron Man, an air-capable action game in development at EA Motive, has appeared online. You can find it on Resetera, though I imagine the video will be taken down soon.
The timestamp “Aug26” indicates that it’s a recent creation. The video itself uses unfinished assets, but the direction and editing suggest that it could be an early version of an official trailer. Or it could be for an internal presentation of some kind. There are some obviously goofy elements, like crediting Hulk as the “world director”. HULK SMASH PROJECT SPRINT.
The game depicted shows various locations – New York, what looks like a slice of historic Japan, with bamboo forests, and the crowded deck of a S.H.I.E.L.D helicarrier, where many mooks await a good solid lasering. Also the word “Chicago” on a sign. There are cutscenes, including that legendary close-up from the Marvel movies of a suit HUD crawling all over Tony’s face. We see what appears to be Pepper Potts and Colonel Rhodes, the guy who pilots War Machine. Everything else is a blur to me, partly because the WIP character models look like haunted custard.
As for how it plays, the game seems redolent of the Marvel’s Spider-Man games in combining swooping aerial traversal with fisticuffs, though it naturally puts a greater emphasis on ranged combat. This is Iron Man, after all. He’s got hypervelocity missiles coming out of his armpits. He’s also got those neat omnipurpose palm repulsors, used for levitation, blastification, and punchification. I punch you! I blast you! I fly away! Haha, you poor bewildered goon. You will never be able to work out what I’m doing next.
EA announced their new Iron Man game – not to be confused with Avalanche’s older, cancelled Iron Man project, which itself is the subject of a recent leak – back in 2022, It was part of a planned wave of EA Marvel adaptations. Since then, EA have abandoned a Black Panther game, and also gotten themselves bought by a Saudi-led consortium with Trump appendage Jared Kushner as figurehead. I wrote about it a little in a piece on Star Wars Zero Company the other week.
The acquisition threatens to create a lot of instability – EA now have an $18 billion debt to pay off. Given how long it’s been since we heard anything concrete about the Iron Man project, I do worry about its chances. This is total speculation, mind. I’ve asked EA for comment.