We finally have a substantial look at the Iron Man game that never made it out of Avalanche Studios, and it looks like Tony Stark got a healthy dose of Just Cause injected into his armored adventures.
Over an hour of footage from the canceled Iron Man game has surfaced online, reportedly pulled from a PlayStation 3 development kit. You can watch that footage here.
The footage offers our best look yet at the project Avalanche’s Stockholm studio was working on during the 2010s before development came to an early end.
It’s rough, unfinished, and clearly nowhere near something that was ready to ship, but there’s enough here to see where Avalanche was taking the game. More importantly, some of it looks like it could have been a lot of fun.
Once Iron Man takes to the air, the Avalanche DNA is recognizable. Tony rockets through the sky at high speeds, and the movement has some similarities to the fast traversal that made Just Cause such a blast to play.
Throw in ridiculous physics, massive explosions, and plenty of destruction, and it isn’t hard to imagine how Avalanche planned to build a full game around Iron Man’s abilities.
The leaked footage also shows off several pieces of Stark tech, including small missiles firing from the armor’s shoulders. There’s aerial combat, close-range fighting, and plenty of environmental destruction throughout the footage.
The melee combat appears to pull some inspiration from the Batman: Arkham games, an approach Avalanche would later use in Mad Max in 2015.
Seeing those ideas combined with Iron Man’s flight and weapons makes this canceled project particularly interesting. Tony Stark is a character practically built for the kind of explosive playground Avalanche specializes in creating.
Unfortunatley, the game never got the opportunity to reach its potential. Former Avalanche Studios co-founder and chief creative officer Christofer Sundberg discussed the canceled project during a 2022 interview with MinnMax.
According to Sundberg, “company politics” played a role in its cancellation, with Disney reportedly looking to shave roughly a year off the development schedule.
By that point, Avalanche had already spent a significant amount of time on the project. Sundberg said the game had been in development “for a couple of years” and believed it was becoming “really, really good.”
Judging from the footage, there were certainly some cool ideas taking shape.
This canceled Avalanche project also shouldn’t be confused with the new Iron Man game currently being developed by Motive Studio and published by EA.
Motive’s Iron Man is a third-person action-adventure game, and while information on it remains limited, the project is still moving forward.
That remains the case despite EA canceling its Black Panther game and shutting down the studio developing it last year. Marvel and EA’s larger gaming partnership continues, with Motive’s take on Tony Stark still part of those plans.
For now, though, this newly surfaced footage gives fans a cool look at an entirely different version of an Iron Man video game.
