Marvel and Disney have built an empire in which very few believed. Each new film from the Marvel universe is a new milestone at the box office, bringing together hundreds of millions of viewers around the world. The Avengers have penetrated deep into the collective imagination, crossing the page of the comic to become real and revered beings, new myths capable of starring in the original legends on which the beliefs of the new generations are based. We all recognize and love characters like Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, Peter Parker, Wolverine, Storm, or Thor. His influence on popular culture, no matter how trite the expression sounds, it is tremendous. Their faces, costumes, and adventures are printed, printed, and modeled on a plethora of accessories, clothes, books, records, television series and video games.
Yes, also video games. We recognize that tricky terrain. Not all video games based on licenses are usually good, nor do all those found on mythical comic characters generally pass the cut. Even those that are excellent or good, considering their universe and approach, pale in comparison to similar or similar ones in consoles and PCs. It is a curious case because the truth is that Marvel, despite having had solid, funny, entertaining or very spectacular exponents, has not enjoyed all the luck or support of the public in their adaptations to digital entertainment.
Drawing a parallel, we could even say that they have yet followed a line similar to the one seen in the cinema before the founding of Marvel Studios in 2008 and the new way of proposing their cinematographic adaptations. Marvel Entertainment has been in video games for many years, specifically since 1982, and until 1985, Marvel Comics Group was in charge of editing and supervising all licenses sold to external studios about games or interactive entertainment products. Later, with the expansion of consoles and home systems, the publisher was forced to found Marvel Entertainment Group, a division more specialized and able to adapt to the vicissitudes of the most varied formats of mass consumption.
From 1999 to 2008, with the increase of video games as an industry, it increased its control with Marvel Enterprises until in 2009, it was decided to found Marvel Games, which became part of Disney Interactive after the merger with the Mickey Mouse company. However, the bad luck of Disney Interactive and individual decisions, led to Marvel Games revives with its name and be responsible for re-editing, producing and supervising each video game with protagonists of the publisher as the main claim.
A maximum guideline was set: nothing to license without looking at the studio or the content. Production levels had to be high or very high, and development had to meet minimum quality requirements. Marvel and Disney were aware that some interactive and digital products had not exceeded the quality standard that had been imposed as creators and editors in film and television, and that had to be reversed. You cannot have a massive and millionaire license in the seventh art and not know how to channel it into the most prestigious entertainment industry in the world. Now, and with Spider-Man of Insomniac Games already published (considered one of the video games of 2008) and with the horizon being drawn by mega-productions like Marvel’s Avengers of Crystal Dynamics, Square Enix and Eidos Montreal, we review in Vandal some of the best Marvel games ever made.
- Captain America and The Avengers (1991
- X-Men Arcade (1992)
- The Punisher (1993)
- X-Men: Children of the Atom (1994)
- X-Men vs. Street Fighter (1996)
- Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes (1998)
- Spider-Man (2000)
- Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes (2000)
- Spider-Man 2 (2004)
- Incredible Hulk Ultimate Destruction (2005)
- Marvel: Ultimate Alliance (2006)
- X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)
- Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 (2009)
- Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions (2010)
- LEGO Marvel Super Heroes (2013)
- Deadpool (2013)
- Spider-Man (PS4 – 2018)