Avalanche Studios, the developer best known for the Just Cause series and 2015’s Mad Max, once spent nearly two years developing an ambitious open-world Iron Man game before the project was ultimately cancelled.
The previously unannounced project was revealed by Avalanche Studios co-founder Christofer Sundberg, who explained that the game was in development for around one and a half to two years before being scrapped around 2012.
Unlike the movie tie-in Iron Man games released during the early years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Avalanche’s project was reportedly being developed as a standalone experience and was not intended to tie directly into Iron Man 3.
The game would have given players a large open world to explore as Iron Man, with one of its biggest features being unrestricted flight. According to Sundberg, players would have been able to simply take off and “fly anywhere,” potentially giving Avalanche the opportunity to bring some of the freedom associated with Just Cause to Marvel’s armoured superhero.
However, flying wasn’t the only major focus.
Avalanche was also putting significant effort into melee combat. Iron Man could use his fists and repulsors during close-range encounters, with players even able to punch enemies through walls. When compared to the combat found in the Batman: Arkham games, Sundberg said Avalanche’s system was “almost” like that, while still allowing Iron Man to take off and fly freely.
Unfortunately, the project became increasingly difficult to manage behind the scenes.
Sundberg blamed its eventual cancellation on “company politics” and an increasingly unrealistic production schedule. Disney reportedly cut around a year from Avalanche’s original development timeline while increasing the project’s budget.
Meeting the new deadline would have required Avalanche to rapidly hire another 70 to 80 developers. The problem was what would happen after Iron Man was finished, as Avalanche would then need to find another project capable of supporting such a significantly expanded development team.
Sundberg believed accepting those conditions could have put the entire company at risk, saying the situation could have “broken the studio completely.” Avalanche ultimately did not move forward under those demands and the Iron Man project was cancelled.
The cancellation was particularly painful because the project had already progressed beyond an early concept. Sundberg said a considerable amount of work had gone into the game and described what Avalanche had built as looking “absolutely amazing.”
No official gameplay footage from Avalanche’s Iron Man has ever been publicly released, leaving players to imagine what the studio’s combination of open-world exploration, unrestricted superhero flight, environmental destruction and heavy melee combat could have eventually become.
More than a decade later, it remains one of gaming’s more fascinating cancelled superhero projects — and given Avalanche’s experience creating enormous open worlds filled with vehicles, explosions and destruction, Iron Man may have been an unusually good fit for the studio.