The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has transformed the entertainment landscape with its interconnected series of films and TV shows, weaving a long-running, cohesive narrative. However, Marvel video games operate independently, each telling its own unique story without any connection to the others. For instance, Insomniac's *Marvel's Spider-Man* games are completely separate 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* have no shared universe or storyline.

There was, however, a time when Disney entertained the idea of creating a Marvel Gaming Universe (MGU) that would mirror the success of the MCU in the realm of video games. So, what led to the abandonment of this ambitious project?

On The Fourth Curtain podcast, host Alexander Seropian and guest Alex Irvine, who both contributed to the MGU concept, shared insights into why the project never came to fruition. Seropian, known for co-founding Bungie, the developer behind *Halo* and *Destiny*, led Disney's video game division until his departure in 2012. Irvine, a veteran writer in the Marvel gaming world, recently worked on *Marvel Rivals*.

Irvine reminisced about 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. It never really happened."

Seropian revealed that the MGU was his initiative but failed to secure funding from Disney's higher-ups: "When I was at Disney, that was my initiative, 'Hey, let’s tie these games together.' It was pre-MCU. But it didn’t get funded."

Irvine, drawing from his experience with the *Halo* alternate reality game *I Love Bees*, elaborated on the potential mechanics of the MGU: "That was so frustrating because we came up with all these great ideas about how to do it. 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 complexity of the MGU concept may have been its downfall. Irvine explained that the intricacies of maintaining consistency across different media platforms deterred some at Disney: "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 ponder what could have been if the MGU had received the necessary funding. 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, *Endgame*-style event.

Looking forward, questions linger about Insomniac's *Marvel's Wolverine*. Will it share the same universe as *Marvel's Spider-Man*? Could characters from the Spider-Man games make appearances in *Wolverine*?

Ultimately, the MGU remains a fascinating "what if" scenario in the world of video games. In another universe, perhaps, it thrives as a reality.