Comic book giant Marvel Entertainment has already conquered the movie industry, and now its sights are set on videogames including, it appears, VR experiences.
That is according to Jay Ong, senior vice president of games and innovation at Marvel. In a recent interview with Gamespot, he confirmed that there are “absolutely” VR projects in the work at the company right now.
“Absolutely expect some announcements in VR,” Ong said, “that’s something we’re really excited about. I think our fans are going to go crazy. The things we’re doing there are absolutely amazing.”
Ong explained that the company had done a “deep dive in looking” at VR towards the end of 2016, and found that it “offers some pretty incredible opportunities” that it’s currently exploring. He didn’t hint as to what the company’s VR projects may be — perhaps they’re related in Marvel’s interest in VR for film — but he certainly didn’t play down how committed Marvel is to the technology.
“We think if we do something there, it shouldn’t be just for the novelty of it,” Ong added. “It should be something that defines the platform, that defines the experience.”
He said that he expects the upcoming Spider-Man game, which is being developed by Edge of Nowhere’s Insomniac Games (though, sadly, not in VR), to be one of the best games on PlayStation 4, while the recently announced Avengers game is expected to be one of the best games on PS4 and Xbox One.
“We think our efforts in VR will be the same thing,” Ong concluded.
That’s certainly bullish, which has us aching to find out what Marvel is working on in VR. Recently, we saw Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg demo prototype glove controllers for the Oculus Rift that he said allowed him to “shoot webs” just like Spider-Man himself. If this tech didn’t look like it was so early in development, we might wage Marvel has teamed up with Oculus similar to how Sony partnered with the company for the PS4 Spider-Man game. That’s just speculation on our part, though.
We have plenty of ideas for superhero VR games, if Marvel needs any ideas.
