Early Footage Offers a Look at Avalanche Studios’ Canceled Iron Man Project

More than an hour of unfinished footage said to come from a canceled Iron Man game at Avalanche Studios has surfaced online, offering a long look at a project that was still in its earliest stages. The material is available through an Internet Archive upload, while the Reddit post sharing it identifies the footage as coming from the studio behind Just Cause and Mad Max.

The build is reportedly sourced from a PS3 development kit. Its unfinished presentation is easy to spot, but the terrain still closely resembles Just Cause 2, giving the superhero project a familiar Avalanche look. Disney and Avalanche never publicly confirmed the collaboration, which was being developed at Avalanche’s Stockholm studio during the early years of the MCU in the 2010s.

Iron Man can rocket through the sky at high speed, attack from the air, and move across the open world with the kind of fast traversal associated with Avalanche’s games. The footage presents a much clearer idea of the project’s core direction than the brief development snapshot initially suggested.

Small missiles fire from the armor’s shoulder hardware. Large explosions, physics-heavy encounters, and environmental destruction appear throughout the footage, suggesting that breaking apart the world could have been a major part of the experience rather than a rare visual trick.

Melee combat seems closer to the Batman: Arkham games than to Just Cause. That close-quarters direction also recalls Avalanche’s work on 2015’s Mad Max, and gives the canceled project a clearer identity than a generic licensed game.

Christofer Sundberg, Avalanche co-founder and former studio boss, discussed the project in a 2022 interview with MinnMax. He said the game had been in development “for a couple of years” before it was canceled because of “company politics.” Sundberg also said Disney wanted to cut about a year from the development schedule, while he believed the game was shaping up to be “really, really good.”

The same uploader is also associated with files from a Grand Theft Auto V build and Agent. Beyond the newly surfaced footage, the project’s broader design and development history remains unknown.

Avalanche’s canceled project is separate from EA Motive’s Iron Man game. Public details on that title remain limited, but it has been described as a third-person action-adventure game starring Iron Man.

What remains is a detailed development snapshot of an Iron Man game that never reached release, preserved before Avalanche’s take on the character could become a finished product.

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