Long before the days of Rocksteady’s Batman Arkham trilogy, and even longer before the arrival of Insomniac’s Spider-Man title, the best comic book video game franchise around was Marvel Ultimate Alliance. It brought together the Marvel Universe in a 4-character hack-n-slash title of great proportions. However, after the second game in the series, the franchise stalled, and many wondered if it ever would return. Then, at The Game Awards, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 was announced as an exclusive for the Nintendo Switch.
While the original games were on Wii, many were curious as to why Marvel choose to not only bring back the franchise after 10 years, but why only bring it back to Nintendo. Marvel Games VP and executive producer Mike Jones talked to GameInformer about Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 and noted that the Switch was the perfect console to bring the game back to:
“We have a lot of reverence from the franchise. We knew it was really important to a lot of people. But we also knew that after 10 years of not having another installment, it wasn’t going to be enough to just make a sequel. That’s expected, and we needed something unexpected. So, for the last few years, we were on the lookout for what that might be. And then one day we found our answer.
Once we understood what Nintendo had in store for the next generation of gaming, by the end of the meeting we were on our feet with excitement, going: ‘This is it! This is the next step for Ultimate Alliance.’”
Nintendo’s Bill Trinnen added his own thoughts to the matter:
“There was a mutual feeling that the series itself was one we hadn’t seen in a long time, and that we wanted to see it come back. From a multiplayer perspective, it’s the ability to just set it up and play it anywhere. From a Marvel content perspective, that feels like the perfect fit for the Switch platform because of the multiplayer focus, and because of the versatility of the platform.”
The game will release exclusively on Switch on July 19th.
