X-Men Coulda,Woulda,Shoulda

Tim Coman and I pitched a game, a long time ago, to Marvel for an episodic X-Men game. Here is an exerpt from an old gamespot post. I really wanted to do this game; and yes that is my picture on the poster directly behind wolverine's head.

If I feel really inspired and the Illini are getting trounced by USC in today's Rose Bowl, maybe I'll see if I can get the build of the game to run.

Check out the blurb on this site if you like
http://chauchau0.tistory.com/entry/History-of-the-X-MEN-games-By-GameSpot

Here are some relevent exerpts.
Original author credits:By Doug Trueman Designed By Katie Bush


Once upon a time, Marvel Comics had the notion that a PC game based on the X-Men might help the once-floundering company. GameSpot got in touch with Tim Coman, a developer on the title, and he wistfully told us how he had envisioned the PC title.

"We originally pitched the idea to Marvel Interactive a few years back. This was right at the time they were declaring bankruptcy. The idea as we pitched it would have included most of the mainstay characters: Cyclops, Wolverine, Storm, Colossus, Phoenix, Professor X, plus tons of hidden characters. The basic premise was that you'd be able to switch between characters. [For example, you'd meet] Sunfire and he'd join your group, not unlike a power-up. You'd then have the ability to switch to using him, complete a specific task, and then switch back. The view on the game was three-quarters down. We went with high-res prerendered characters moving over a continuous background. Our original idea was to base levels on the Claremont/Byrne run of the comics.

"We wanted to have each of the levels lead to the next, [like the series]. We might have started in the Savage Land where the player would meet up with Kazar then progress to Proteus, Murderworld, the White Queen Saga, ending with the Phoenix vs. Imperial Guard on the Moon. We thought it might be cool to have sublevels with subplots like the comic, like having Wolvie fight a bunch of Ninjas sent by his girlfriend's father, [but] Marvel was more interested in having just the Apocalypse storyline featured. Another idea we bounced back and forth was to have add-on packs of characters that you could plug into the game. [For example], if you wanted to buy Havok as a main character you could purchase just that character and load him in. We talked about being able to download him off the Internet as well. We had also talked about having continuing sagas, so you could buy the next saga instead of having the complete game come out all at once. [We thought of selling] the game in installments and having the option of buying the whole game after the whole series came out [like] the trade paperback model of releasing comics. We spent some amount of time on the engine [and eventually] we had Wolverine and Storm moving around. We included the Brood as enemies you could fight against. These were at a rough stage of development but possibly of interest to fans of X-Men."

It's a shame this title never made it past the development stage, but with Marvel having some financial difficulties at this time, it doesn't come as much of a surprise. Maybe in the future. Below are some shots of the game in its early development stages, taken before the ax fell.