Ever since their inception in the 1960s, the X-Men have served as a cultural touchstone, providing a fictional world where issues of social oppression could be explored. On top of that, they’re superheroes with radical powers. X-Men ’97 has doubled down on that to create the best Marvel series on Disney+ yet.
However, this has made a certain void all the more tangible: Where are all the X-Men games? Marvel games have made a resurgence over the past several years, leading to excellent titles based on the Midnight Sons, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Spider-Man. But outside of one Wolverine game and guest character slots in Marvel’s Midnight Suns and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 3, the X-Men have largely gone ignored in the game space.
There’s one X-Men game primed for revival: X-Men Legends. Superhero games developed by Raven Software and published by Activision in the early 2000s, they are approachable action RPGs that swap out fantasy clichés for superhero ones. In single-player or co-op, X-Men Legends lets players control a team of up to four mutants. The fun of combat comes from finding ways to combo and combine each character’s abilities and upgrade them over time with XP.
The gameplay systems aren’t as deep as something like Diablo IV, but the approachable nature of the series made it a go-to co-op option for many. While its sequel polished and expanded on what the first X-Men Legends did, ultimately setting the stage for Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, one of the best superhero video games of all time, X-Men Legends has not been acknowledged since 2005’s Rise of Apocalypse.
Living and learning in the X-Mansion and going on missions with the X-Men feels like such an obvious foundation for a great RPG. It’s shocking that so few games have capitalized on it outside of X-Men Legends and its sequel. It speaks to how the X-Men’s video game presence has greatly diminished. There were tons of X-Men games in the 1990s and 2000s when they, along with Spider-Man, were Marvel’s most valuable properties.
With the dawn of the MCU and Disney’s deemphasizing of video games and X-Men in the 2010s, the X-Men’s standing in the video game space pretty much died. Since then, all X-Men fans have gotten is the appearances of characters like Wolverine in games like Ultimate Alliance 3 or Marvel’s Midnight Suns. The best representation has come from Marvel Snap, which has held Avengers versus X-Men and Exiles-themed seasons to bookend X-Men ’97.
Looking back at how well games like X-Men Legends worked and the success of X-Men ’97, one can’t help but yearn for the X-Men’s grand gaming return. For now, that task seems to be one solely for Insomniac Games to solve. That lauded studio is working on Marvel’s Wolverine; if information exposed in last year’s leak is accurate, it has the exclusive rights to X-Men in video games and are planning a full-on X-Men game. Those projects are potentially years out, and while one is excited for them, X-Men feels like too vast a property to limit to just one developer.
Embracing diversity is a concept that’s at the core of the X-Men, and it seems counterintuitive to restrict who has storytelling access to these characters. One can’t wait to play Marvel’s Wolverine, but it would be great to see even more developers, big and small, get the chance to make a game about the X-Men. It’s too fruitful and eternally relevant of a franchise to not allow that opportunity.
