Square Enix and Marvel announce video game deal, making The Avengers

Yesterday at 10 a.m. eastern time, Marvel and Square Enix both simultaneously tweeted messages teasing an announcement 24 hours later. Was it pure coincidence, or were the two companies working together? Today, the two companies answered the question by announcing a multi-game partnership.

Big News: @SquareEnix and @Marvel announce a multi-game partnership leading with The Avengers project. #Reassemblepic.twitter.com/DS87Iuzk7G

— Square Enix (@SquareEnix) January 26, 2017

The partnership will begin with an Avengers-centric project that looks to be centered around getting the band back together after something separated them. That could be an allusion to the events of Captain America: Civil War or even the upcoming Infinity War storyline in the MCU, but there have been plenty of reasons over the years for Marvel’s A-Team to be broken up.

The partnership, so far, involves both Rise of the Tomb Raider developer Crystal Dynamics and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided developer Eidos Montreal. The two teams have been pumping out stellar games lately, so this seems like a pairing that will lead to some solid games.

Superhero games kinda suck

The list of bad superhero games is far, far longer than the list of good ones. When Marvel was starting to boot up its cinematic universe, they had a couple licensed titles, including an Iron Man game from Sega. The games sat firmly on the list of bad games. Marvel quickly took action, though.

While it’s hard to call the individual Marvel films groundbreaking, Marvel has taken a long-term approach since the success of the first Iron Man film, taking measures to make the success last rather than to make it burn brightly. Rather than hammering us with bad games, the games simply stopped. Aside from some LEGO games and some free-to-play stuff, we haven’t seen a peep out of Marvel even as series like the Batman: Arkham games, Infamous, and even the Injustice fighting games proved there’s still fun to be had.

With Marvel having paired with Square Enix, it’s likely we can expect some good stuff. This teaser, though, is pretty sparse. I’d be surprised if we saw the first Marvel game before late 2018.

Either way, this is something for comic book fans to get excited about, and now we get to start theorizing about what they’re working on. What are you hoping for?