Marvel not doing 'crappy' movie games anymore, says exec

by Alexander Sliwinski on Aug 19th 2009 7:00AM

Marvel Executive Vice President of Global Digital Media Group (wow, long title) Ira Rubenstein tells Joystiq that Marvel is done making "crappy" movie-based games. The executive told us that while the company would like to have games tied to the release of movies, each character should stick to their own worlds. He used the recent X-Men Origins: Wolverine game as an example of what the company is looking to do. The M-rated Wolverine game was clearly not based around the PG-13 escapade in theaters.

"We are not doing movie-based games anymore," Rubenstein said following yesterday's announcement of Digital Comics for PSN at Sony's GamesCom press conference. "Actually, wait ... we are not doing crappy movie-based games anymore. You can quote me on that." Oh, we did.

Rubenstein tells us that work on Iron Man 2 has been in process since the first game wrapped. He wasn't involved in the first one, so he asked us not to blame him for that wreck. However, he swears the second one is going to be good. He's also really excited about the Thor game and seems proud with the team working on it. If Wolverine is any indication of future Marvel games, it seems that Rubenstein is doing his best to make sure fans of the comics won't be served watered-down Hollywood entertainment.

Tags: gamescom, gamescom-2009, ira-rubenstein, iron-man, iron-man-2, marvel, rubenstein, x-men-origins-wolverine, X-Men-Origins-Wolverine-Uncaged-Edition

Reader Comments (66)

Iron man game was so terrible. I find this hard to swallow.

I feel I need to underline this point even more.. The first Iron Man is one of the worst games I have ever played.

Even further...

The wolverine game was only good cause it was being developed yrs before the film was put into production. How can they manage that with iron man2 or Thor already near completetion.?

Iron man 2 wont be out for a while.

If you'd actually READ the article, he wasn't involved with the first Iron Man game. Or maybe I imagined "He wasn't involved in the first one, so he asked us not to blame him for that wreck."

@ Z

I did read the article... Don't be stupid. This guys involvement was never the question. It's all about development time. My theory is wolverine came out so well because it had a good year or 2 jump on the movie. So they were already deep into delevopment when the wolverine movie was announced. Then they meshed the franchise and slapped some movie plot into the game.

These new titles still have the movie release date as their deadline, and who knows when production began.. so unless they've been in development for longer then the movie has been in production, I don't believe that they will be any better then any other shoddy movie licensed game.

Wolverine was still obviously a movie tie in game, painfully underpolished, which is a real pity because with a little extra work that game could have been truly awesome. Still, if that's the level future games at least achieve, well we're in brighter times.

Further..

Just cause some jabroni says his games won't suck, doesn't mean there's any validity to those claims.. Want proof.. Goto IGN and look up any videos of developers talking about how great either of the Transformers games were gonna be pre-release.. both were terrible & tanked.

Thundercats was a great show.

That's right folks! We'll be focusing all of our efforts to bring you high quality products for the core gamer!

What about crappy, non-movie based games? How was X-Men Origins: Wolverine?

It was fun but fairly shallow and short. It wasn't a bad game by any means, but we're not talking Half Life 2 here.

It was everything a wolverine game should be. First game ever for me to get 1000/1000 gamerscore too.

i´ll believe that when I see it...although I loved the wolverine game

(on 1st part) Here! Here!
(on 2nd) I passed on the Wolverine game because I was under the impression that all movie games are crappy.

Right, but again...

The wolverine origins game was not a movie-based title in the traditional terms. From my understanding, it had a few yrs development already completed then the movie came along and slapped it's likeness onto the product.

That game would've come out regaurdless of the movies release.

Understood, but any game with a similar title as a movie or the words "the movie" in its title gets an automatic nothanks.jpeg.

"That game would've come out regardless of the movies release."

No, the game was made for the movie. The difference being they got the developers on board from word go, rather than treating a game as a marketing tool and trying to get it slapped together last minute.

@dartmerc...go back thru the Joystiq archives.....they interviewed the dev and the game was in the works before the movie was and then the movie people came along and they began to work together...

"The M-rated Wolverine game was clearly not based around the PG-13 escapade in theaters."

ummm...yea it was. Altho it expanded on it WAY more and in general told a better story, the base of its plot was the same as the movie

Wolverine game was great, definitely not perfect (I encountered many bugs), but was a pleasant experience.

I recall an interview a while back mentioning that the movie took ideas from the game, not the other way around.

Looks like Sega's losing some business. THQ, your NEXT!

Bill Goldberg?

Who'd want to have Sega as a publisher when they see 150,000 copies sold as a success?

The Wolverine game was (is) the biggest surprise of the year so far for me. It didn't do anything ground-breaking but I fully expected it fail like every other movie tie in. A buddy called and said I had to check the demo out. After I played I called a few more friends and so on and so on.

Around 8 of us beat the game over the next week. One of the best games of 2009 so far. I really enjoyed it and the cut-scenes were amazing.

The game had Portal, WoW and one other nerd-culture reference that slips my mind right now. Finding the cake by using the "portals" was pretty fulfilling (see what I did there?)

The combat only got old if you refused to play around with combos. Just like The Force Unleashed, you could beat it with a couple moves but it's a lot more fun if you experiment.

i love the wolverine game and hope they make more games like it.

PINCH OF SALT COMES TO MIND.

If Ironman 2 is so great, show us the money!

Anyone can say oh this game is going to be better . we are done making crap games.

and oh " don't blame me i wasn't on the first one" lol

Why take so long to come out with the statement and say "this one will be better" with no proof to back up your story.

hmmmm certain games are just ment to be FREE

How about a game called Marvel vs Capcom 3? I heard that one wouldn't be crappy.

^This^

What do you want from MvC3 ? The game already has like 60 (95% useless) characters.

What do you want from MvC3 ? Oh, a lot of things could be neat, actually.

MvC2 is quite old now. First of all, a 3-D treatment ala Street Fighter 4 would be the best place to start. Secondly, it IS about the characters. The title of the game alone implies that any sort of plot or logic will not apply as this is a nerdgasm of epic proportions. The more obscure fantasy and sci-fi characters you throw in the better, regardless of how useless they actually are. Everyone's a fan of something, if you're pleasing all the fans in a video game/comic mash-up you're doing your job correctly. And while there was a huge plethora of characters in 2, there was not nearly as many stages - or relevant stages for that matter. Another decent idea I could think of is to include a Super Smash Bros.-esque Vault of information. Details for each character, maybe a few comic shots, short video from a Capcom game, creator trivia, maybe like a short making-of detailing the process of how two companies like this collaborated on such a project.

The bottom line: I should make video games. You would all buy them. I've got great ideas for Sonic Team that I'm thinking about sending to their sorry asses.

Are they going to quit making 'crappy' movies? I'd be more impressed by that.

Exactly.
And they can start with a new Ghost Rider, and we can all just tell ourselves that the first one never even existed. And don't let Nicholas Cage anywhere near that set!!

They have, in a way. All of the Marvel movies before Iron Man were done by loaning out the IP to a studio and pretty much letting them have free reign. From that system we got the X-Men and Spider-Man movies, the first Hulk, Ghost Rider, the two Punisher movies, etc. Marvel decided to take more direct control over their movie production, and so far we've gotten two decent movies out of it, Iron Man and the new Hulk (I believe the rights to X-Men are still owned by Fox or whoever, so the Wolverine movie was done by them under the old system, hence its suckitude). If they can keep it going, we might continue to get good comic book movies.

Now if only every movie company vowed to never make a crappy movie game again the world would be a better place.

so they're just going to stop doing movie / game tie-in's entirely now? 'cause traditionally they all suck.... now if they quit trying to make games into movies as well, because those too are a litany of suck, all the industry would be a happy place.

Crappy games still make money.

Hollywood loves money.

Money makes more money. You can't stop the cycle.

This picture of iron man lying on a destroyed classic, the shelby, is particularly insulting.

Dude, you totally get it.

I was going to write a comment to the same effect.

I hope they do their best to stay true to this promise. I would like to see their movie-based games reach the same bar of quality (or better) that their non-movie based games do. Marvel Ultimate Alliance and even older titles like Spider-Man 2, Maximum Carnage, and X-Men 2 (GEN) come to mind.

Has he told Activision?

Huh? It's THEIR license. Activision has to play ball :p

yeah yeah yeah! Lies all lies. Iron-Man2 will suck just like the first one and Wolverine was just boring to me. Hulk was ass and the Spider man games have fallen off. Marvel Alliance is the only good marvel games just stick to those and call it a day.

I know it's hard to believe but it is great news if it's true. DC stepped up their shit with Batman.

I think Batman upped the ante. Marvel, your move.

That's exactly what I though, too. These comments about no more crappy movie-tie-in-games comes right before the release of a new Batman game that is garnering incredible reviews.

I think this Batman game, when put next to the last Iron Man or Hulk game, really makes Marvel's properties look terrible.

I wouldn't say that it's just the new Batman. You've gotta consider that two critically acclaimed original superhero IPs were released this year - Prototype and Infamous. If anything, Marvel just realized that the competition whether from DC or elsewhere isn't just trying to cash in on the superhero craze but is actually attemption to make solid games. If Marvel hopes to compete at making games at all, they need to step their game up. Aside from the Alliance games, the last really good one was Hulk: Ultimate Destruction and we all know that the last Hulk game was just H:UD redux.

Did the first Iron Man really suck that badly? My friend said it was Sega's second best-selling game.. Either of the month it came out or for the fiscal year.. Or something.

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Marvel not doing 'crappy' movie games anymore, says exec

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