Yes, you read right. Roughly 10 years ago there was an Iron Man game in development by the folks behind the Just Cause series, Avalanche Studios, but it was ultimately cancelled by Disney. The cancelled Iron Man game is said to have had Arkham-style melee combat.

We know this because of a recent interview from MinnMax with Avalanche’s co-founder Christofer Sundberg where he breaks down a few tantalizing design choices the developers were working to implement. For one, it sounds like it would’ve been an open-world game, as Sundberg says you would’ve been able to “take off and fly anywhere” at will.

It was suggested by Sundberg that the flying aspect would be second to the combat which would have been melee-focused. “Yeah, we had a flying character in the game, but a lot of the focus was on the melee fighting, like being able to punch other characters through walls as Iron Man does with the repulsor and everything.” MinnMax’s host Ben Hanson asked if the combat would be comparable to Batman: Arkham series and Sundberg replied, “Almost, yeah.”

In this clip from MinnMax's interview, Avalanche Studios co-founder Christofer Sundberg reveals for the first time that the creators of Just Cause were working on an open-world Iron Man game before Disney and Marvel canceled the game around 2012. https://t.co/Ups3MrWmE4 pic.twitter.com/ODeya496uE

— MinnMax (@MinnMaxShow) August 17, 2022

Asked for specifics on what happened to the project, Sundberg said vaguely that it involved “company politics.” He also explained that the project was a “total mess” by the end and that Disney kept tightening the development timeline. “We would have had to hire 70-80 people to the team that I would have had a responsibility to find a new project for,” Sundberg said.

Sundberg reckons the project was in active development for about two years before Disney cancelled it. “It was painful because so much time and energy had been spent on it, and it looked absolutely amazing,” he recalled.

When Hanson suggested hopefully that things might line up for a continuation of the project at a later time, Sundberg only echoed his optimism. Until then, we can only dream of the open-world, ass-kicking Iron Man game that could’ve been.