Flashback: The Story of Genepool’s Cancelled ‘Invincible Iron Man’ Game

Update (Wednesday 3rd July 2024 13:00 BST): A demo of the game has now been found and recovered by former Genepool developer Kevin Edwards, so we’ve decided to update the original article below, which was originally published on 29th September 2022.

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With Marvel Entertainment and EA Motive reportedly working on a new Iron Man game, it recently got us thinking about a topic we looked at in 2021: Invincible Iron Man — a cancelled game for the PS2, Xbox, and GameCube that was in development between 2003 and 2004.

In case you didn’t know, Activision was the publisher of this cancelled project, with Greater Manchester-based studio Genepool Software supposedly creating the game to loosely tie in with a film project that was in development at the time. The team at Genepool had previously worked with Activision on X2: Wolverine’s Revengea cross-platform action game that received mixed reviews, but landed the job on Iron Man thanks to Activision’s executive vice president of Worldwide Studios Larry Goldberg, who was impressed by the company’s work ethic.

Dave Anthony, one of Genepool’s co-founders, told us in 2021: “The reason we got the Iron Man deal is because the guy who was running the studios at Activision at the time was Larry Goldberg… and he knew we had given it our best shot. He knew it wasn’t working as well as everyone wanted. But he really appreciated the effort we put in, and I think he knew we had grown through the process, and he gave us another chance.”

Throughout 2021, we did our best to reach out to as many people as possible who worked on the game, which put us in touch with Justin Heyes-Jones, a former Genepool programmer. Jones was able to share his memories of the project with us, including Tony Crowther (of Monty Mole (celebrity) was apparently involved.

“There was a lot of work on the game engine and the tools (for Iron Man),” he told us. “After Wolverine’s Revenge, we hired a number of people who all came from another studio that had closed. Among them were Tony Crowther and Stephen Robinson, who are both very distinguished in the industry…

“They had very similar ideas about how to build a development platform that would speed up development by giving game designers more control over how they built and wrote the game. I was leading the AI ​​team and we had a similar approach to behavior description and realistic pathfinding tools.”

As we continued to chat with the team, we eventually discovered several pieces of concept art from the game, sent to us by Anthony. These seemed to indicate that Black Widow and the villain Ghost would be making an appearance at some point in the game. Ghost, in case you didn’t know, is an inventor and hacker in the Marvel Comics universe who wears a suit that can make him invisible. The character debuted in Iron Man #219 in June 1987 and was originally created by Bob Layton and David Michelinie.

In addition to the concept art, Genepool also produced a demo, which we initially thought was lost before former Genepool programmer Kevin Edwards released some screenshots and videos of the game in July 2024.

We asked Edwards a few questions, including how he managed to get his hands on the version and whether he could share it publicly. He responded: “I just found a Milestone Xbox DVD among the hundreds of discs I have in my archives. I’m not sure if I can share it at this point. I’ll be posting more information about the game in the coming days, so keep an eye out for it! AFAIK, no one else has a version of the game, so this is 99.99% the only version out there. This is the Xbox version I worked on. There was also a PS2 and PC version.”

We asked Edwards a few more questions about nature and will update this article when we have a response.

According to people we spoke to, this demo of the game featured Iron Man attacking an underground base, flying around and fighting a group of robots and machines. Those who saw it at the time, including Richard Browne (who was then at THQ headquarters) called it “impressive“, but unfortunately it never got past that first version.

“I’ll always remember the moment I was sitting in my office with[producer]Jason Blundell and I got a phone call,” Anthony told us. “It lasted a minute, and I looked at him and said, ‘This project has just been scrapped.’ He was just as stunned as I was, because we had just had a review of the game where they were telling us it was one of the best prototypes they’d seen.”

The exact reasons for the game’s cancellation remain a mystery to everyone involved. Some suspect that the Iron Man movie the project was tied to had entered development hell, forcing Activision to change its plans. But, around the same time, the publisher was also confusingly working on another Iron Man game with Dave Mirra: BMX Freestyle Developer Z-Axis, which was in development for a year longer than Genepool’s project before it was later canceled, so it’s possible that Activision simply spread itself too thin and wanted to focus on one project over the other.

Whatever the reason, the news was devastating for the studio. Genepool had spent six months working on the project and had no chance to reuse the material due to the specificity of the license and the tools that had been created, most of which had been adapted to Iron Man’s flying abilities.

Genepool tried to use him to get other work, but eventually the studio closed in 2004. Iron Man, meanwhile, wouldn’t star in another single-player game until 2008. Iron Manfrom Sega.