For two years, Avalanche Studios – the team behind the Just Cause series, were working on an open-world Iron Man game – which was sadly cancelled. In an interview with MinnMaxx, (thanks to a report from Eurogamer), the co-founder of Avalanche Studios, Christofer Sundberg, revealed that due to “company politics,” the Iron Man title was cancelled.
“I was a mess by the end,” Sundberg says, explaining that the development time for the game had been radically shortened, which led to an increase in their budget and the hiring of seventy to eighty people to a team to complete the game. Sundberg later described the hiring process as a “nightmare.”
“I would have had responsibility to find a new project for, but the development time was shortened down so much so it was impossible, it would have broken the studio completely if we’d have agreed to that.” Sundberg explained.
“With that one year of development time cut from the original plan, I had one year less to find a new project for a big development team which would have been impossible” Sundberg continues. “It was a good experience from a development standpoint, business-wise, it wasn’t very good.” Sundberg adds.
While Sundberg remains relatively ambiguous with the finer details, he revealed the significance of melee combat within the Iron Man game – referring to the idea of the superhero being able to push enemies through walls with the use of his suit technology.
When asked to describe the fallout from the cancellation, Sundberg described the experience as “a tough one,” adding “We didn’t have to lay off anyone because we had other teams that were growing so in that sense it wasn’t as painful as it was in 2008, but it was painful because so much time and energy had been spent on it, and it looked absolutely amazing, so that was the toughest part.”
