Just Cause developer spent two years working on canceled Iron Man game

Avalanche Studios, the developer known for the Just Cause game series, worked on an official Iron Man game for two years about ten years ago, but that title was eventually canceled.

This information is shared by Avalanche co-founder Christofer Sundberg in a interview on the YouTube channel MinnMax. He says that the Swedish Avalanche studio in Stockholm was approached in 2012 by Disney and Marvel. The studio started work on the open world game that year. So after two years, the plug was pulled from that project.

Sundberg speaks of a “mess” because Disney cut development time by a year. This led to an ever-increasing budget requirement. According to him, Avalanche would have had to hire 70 to 80 additional people to complete the game in line with Disney’s expectations. “That would have completely destroyed the company,” he says. According to Sundberg, there wouldn’t have been a new project for all those extra powers after completing the Iron Man game.

Sundberg says it was hard to see how two years of development work ended up in the trash, but he’s pleased that this canceled project hasn’t resulted in layoffs, as happened at Avalanche in 2008. According to the co-founder, the Iron Man game looks really good and he hopes the project will be brought back to life someday. However, that seems unlikely to him, partly because it is now a ten-year-old Iron Man game.

The developer doesn’t say much about how the game worked, but did share that a lot of thought had gone into the fistfights, with a special focus on Iron Man’s repulsor gloves. This gave players the opportunity to launch enemies through a wall, for example. Undoubtedly, some degree of destruction had been involved, as is typical of the somewhat bombastic gameplay of Avalanche’s Just Cause series. In that series, Just Cause 2 came out in 2010 and the third part came out in 2015. Just Cause 4 arrived in 2018.