X-Men Origins: Wolverine could have been a shrug and a yawn like every other promotional movie-tie in game around 2009, but developer Raven Software instead made a genuinely impressive action game that even outshone its source material. It wasn't easy.
As producer Keith Fuller tells FRVR in a recent interview, Raven was tasked with making its blustery action game before the movie of the same name was even close to finished. "It was harrowing to go through that process," Fuller says. "Had they made the movie and then they're like, 'Hey, do the game' – different story. The fact that they were still crafting the script as they were recording parts of the movie and we're trying to make the game, that was really difficult."
Movie tie-in games have generally fallen out of favor in the entertainment world – now that the video game industry is out of its awkward teenage years, you're be more likely to see a movie based on a game rather than the other way around. But in the 2000s, they were a ubiquitous (and notoriously shabby) gimmick which, Fuller explains, at least earned your studio a "guaranteed amount of money."
At the same time, the producer adds, "You are almost guaranteed that it's going to be, probably, not a great movie and you won't get a chance to do anything justice in your work." That scenario threatened X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which Raven decided to do "because it's freaking Wolverine," though its namesake movie was a wreck of unfinished scripts, sudden costume changes, and location swaps.
"That's easy enough to recast somebody and put a different costume on them," Fuller reflects, "but, for us, that's weeks of work creating the skeleton, the model, the textures, and doing the motion capture, and all these sorts of things."
The whole process was like "trying to build a house on shifting sands," but he ultimately believes X-Men Origins: Wolverine "may be the best instance of a movie tie-in where the game was better than the movie." Clearly. Insomniac's upcoming PS5 game Marvel's Wolverine takes obvious inspiration from its explosive combat almost 20 years later. And on its own, X-Men Origins: Wolverine still holds up as a PS3 spectacle.
Though, it's not quite one of the 10 best Marvel games of all time.
