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

Nearly 90 minutes 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.

What Avalanche’s Iron Man footage shows

The material is split across nine clips, with Iron Man flying through large environments and jumping straight into combat. He can rocket through the sky at high speed, fire repulsor cannons, launch small missiles from his shoulder hardware, and use other gadgets while moving across the open world.

Several sequences push the aerial action further, showing Iron Man battling fighter jets and helicopters. One clip carries the title E3 Demo and includes a full opening sequence, a startup screen, a battle against a giant mech, and fights with foot soldiers.

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. The rough video quality does not hide how much variety the canceled project was aiming for.

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, while the flying and combat sequences bring to mind the earlier Iron Man game released on PSP and PS3.

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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