breh you helped develop MUA1?? Prolly the best marvel universe console release to date . Man I remember we got the Hulk and Venom as DLC later and Moon Knight was pre-order exculsive.
Had some of my best gaming memories as comic book head with that game like...
Smashing out Doom as the Hulk, Silver Surfer, Dr. Strange and Ghost Riser
Or wrecking shyt with BP, Blade, Luke Cage and Storm as team Black Excellence
Who were the other characters yall HAD to implement upon Marvel's request? Damn it's been almost 10 years since that piff first dropped.
We had already been praised for the Spiderman series and X-Men Legends series so since MUA was considered XML3 we had free reign to choose the characters for the most part. We had a good track record and Marvel knew it would sell so there were only a few things we
had to do or couldn't do. I was actually working on Spiderman 3 at the time... or Call of Duty 3... or something. I forget. I was only asked for input cause I knew more about Marvel than anyone working at Activision on our floor.
If you remember the game has a trivia computer that gives you XP. So the testers would have to keep answering the questions to make sure it was working correctly. They were given an answer key to answer the questions, but after awhile they were like "Psycho knows this stuff" so they would just read the question aloud and I'd tell them the answer from across the room cause I knew them all from the comics. So it became a game. Then at one point our main supervisor for the floor brought me in to provide input on the roster.
Like you said, Hulk was DLC included later cause they negotiated to use him. Actually, I believe Marvel did cause of fan complaints. He was the number one requested character by a mile, second was Nightcrawler but that was just due to him stealing the show in the last X-Men movie that was in peoples minds at the time.
I told them to put Cyclops in the actual game, but they thought they had enough X-Men w/Wolv Storm Iceman. They didn't understand that actual x-men comic fans
love Cyclops and actual avenger fans love Hawkeye. They ignored me and excluded both cause they thouhgt most people would be fine with Wolv/Iceman/Storm or Cap/Ironman/Thor... But once the game was out my predictions were correct and thats how the DLC ended up being Cyclops, Hawkeye, Nightcrawler and Hulk.
Nightcrawler being playable actually breaks the storyline of the game... I'm sure they had no intention of him ever being playable.
As for roster notes, there were a few specific things we were not allowed to do like we were asked not to include what would be considered variant versions of characters that could confuse casual fans. So once Spiderman and Ironman were on the roster there was zero chance of War Machine or Scarlet Spider being on the roster. Collosus is
only in the game cause we couldnt use Hulk originally. The only characters I suggested that could of been used and were not included were Beast, Scarlet Witch, and Blackcat... not counting ppl that appear but are not playable like Namor and Vision.
Punisher, She-Hulk, Firestar,as well but they had liscensing things going on. Cyc and Hawkeye were added later.
I would not have included Collosus, Moon Knight, or Silver Surfer (I didn't think he fit, power level wise... not as a playable char).
I'm most surprised they inlcluded Spider-Woman who I suggested but really didn't expect would make the cut. I think she got affirmative actioned in cause they wanted more women.
They even included her Arachnae version which I also suggested cause I just assumed they were gonna use Scarlet Witch as well. So I thought Arachnae/Scarlet Witch/Deadpool and Malice would give you a
Brotherhood of Evil team bonus... but they didn't use Scarlet Witch and for some reason didnt give Invisible Woman her Malice costume even though she was already part of the permenant roster before I was even asked.
(Sue Richards as Malice, for those that don't know)
@MartyMcFly
they should have leased the properties though... Not sold them the rights with some dumb non use clause written in...
