The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has revolutionized entertainment with its interconnected films and TV shows, weaving a compelling, ongoing narrative. In contrast, Marvel video games have traditionally operated as standalone entities, with no shared universe connecting them. For instance, Insomniac's Marvel's Spider-Man series stands independently from Eidos-Montreal's Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy. Similarly, upcoming titles like Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra, Marvel's Wolverine, and Marvel's Blade are also disconnected from one another.

However, there was once an ambitious plan at Disney to develop a Marvel Gaming Universe (MGU) that would mirror the MCU's success in the gaming world. What led to its abandonment?

On The Fourth Curtain podcast, hosts Alexander Seropian and guest Alex Irvine discussed their involvement in the MGU concept and shed light on why it never came to fruition. Seropian, a co-founder of Bungie known for Halo and Destiny, led Disney's video game division until 2012. Irvine, a veteran writer in the Marvel gaming space, most recently contributed to Marvel Rivals.

Irvine reminisced about the early days of his involvement with Marvel games, revealing the initial vision for the MGU. "When I first started working on Marvel games, there was this idea that they were going to create a Marvel gaming universe that was going to exist in the same way that the MCU did," he said. "It never really happened."

Seropian confirmed that the MGU was his initiative, pitched before the MCU's success. "When I was at Disney, that was my initiative, 'Hey, let's tie these games together.' It was pre-MCU," he stated. "But it didn’t get funded."

Irvine, drawing from his experience with alternate reality games like I Love Bees at Bungie, elaborated on the MGU's potential structure. "That was so frustrating because we came up with all these great ideas about how to do it," he said. "And I was coming out of ARGs at that point and thinking, 'Wouldn’t it be cool if we had some ARG aspects?' There would be a place where players could go that all the games touched, and we could move them back and forth from game to game. We could link in comics, we could loop in anything, we could do original stuff. And then, as Alex said, it didn’t get funded. So we made a bunch of games."

The MGU's failure to secure funding can be attributed to its complexity. Irvine noted, "Even back then, we were trying to figure out, 'If there’s going to be this MGU, how is it different from the comics? How is it different from the movies? How are we going to decide if it stays consistent?' And I think some of those questions got complex enough that there were people at Disney who didn’t really want to deal with them."

It's intriguing to speculate on what might have been if the MGU had received the necessary support. Perhaps Insomniac’s Spider-Man games would have shared a universe with Square Enix’s Marvel's Avengers and Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, featuring cross-game cameos and culminating in a grand event akin to the MCU's Endgame.

Looking forward, fans are curious about Insomniac's Marvel's Wolverine game. Will it be set in the same universe as Marvel's Spider-Man? Could there be crossover appearances or narrative connections?

Sadly, the MGU remains a fascinating "what if" in gaming history, though perhaps in an alternate universe, it thrives.