Image credit: X (Twitter)
Nearly 97 minutes of gameplay from Avalanche Studios’ cancelled open-world Iron Man game has surfaced online, giving players their first substantial look at a project Disney and Marvel abandoned in 2012. The footage, which appeared on Archive.org on August 24, was reportedly captured from a PlayStation 3 development kit. The leaked material is from a different Iron Man game than the one EA’s Motive Studio has been developing since 2022.
The Avalanche project was built in Stockholm and had never been publicly shown before the footage emerged.
Why Avalanche’s Iron Man game was canceled
Avalanche co-founder Christofer Sundberg first discussed the canceled Iron Man project publicly in an August 2022 interview with MinnMax. That would have required Avalanche to hire 70 to 80 additional developers, leaving the studio without another project for those employees once development ended. Until the leak, Sundberg’s 2022 interview was the main public source describing the project. The Avalanche footage is not from EA’s Iron Man game, which Motive Studio has been developing since EA announced the project in September 2022. It is also different from The Invincible Iron Man, an early-2000s Xbox prototype from Genepool Software that a former developer surfaced in 2024. The studio said in 2023 that the game was being developed using Unreal Engine 5, while EA reaffirmed the project after canceling Black Panther and closing Cliffhanger Games.
Because of what Sundberg described as “company politics, disney and Marvel eventually canceled the game around 2012. That leaves three publicly surfaced Iron Man game projects that were never released: Genepool’s prototype, Avalanche’s canceled game and EA Motive’s still-in-development title. Meanwhile, EA has not released gameplay footage or announced a release date for Motive Studio’s Iron Man.
The footage consists of eight videos identified as dem1 to dem6, and two versions identified as “e3,” with a total run time of 96 minutes and 56 seconds. The development kit kicks off with a custom Iron Man theme and features “TM & © 2012 Marvel” beneath the hostname “devtool. One sequence shows a target 3,360 meters away, with the character flying over desert mountains that resemble the setting in “Just Cause 2”. Completing part of the sequence triggers a “SAM Site Destroyed!” notification. The “e3” labels appear to indicate builds prepared for a demonstration, although the uploader has not confirmed what those labels refer to. Disney approached the studio behind Just Cause, and the project remained in development in Stockholm for about two years, according to Sundberg. Sundberg said Disney wanted the development schedule shortened by a year. He said accepting the shorter schedule would have “broken the studio completely.
The gameplay shows Iron Man taking off from open water and flying toward targets across a large environment. On the ground, one mission takes Iron Man through a base filled with shipping containers and floodlights. The armour shown in the footage uses the red-and-gold design from the Iron Man movie. The videos also show the character combining flight with ground combat and repulsor attacks. Those elements are visible in the newly surfaced footage. No gameplay footage or screenshots had been publicly available. EA’s game remains in development and is a separate project. The uploader is reportedly a collector of development kits and described the videos as recordings made from a restored build on one of their PS3 development kits. The Reddit post that circulated the footage also linked the uploader to other recently surfaced development files. Neither Avalanche Studios nor Marvel has commented on the newly surfaced footage. Get the latest technology news and updates. Download the TOI App.
Sundberg previously described the game as featuring Arkham-style melee combat, repulsor blasts and the ability to take off and fly freely around its world.