TQ Jefferson, the Vice President of Games Production at Marvel, gave some answers to questions about the recent Marvel video games yesterday on the X-Play stage. Hosted by Blair Herter, the interview started off with asking why Marvel saw video games as a good medium to tell their famous comic book stories.
- What is it about video games that translates as a good medium for comic books?
“Video games offer us an opportunity to tell or re-tell stories in a very new and very immersive way. It’s very different from television or film, which are passive experiences. For video games, you actually get to be and control the character, allowing a form of role-play that’s new and interesting.”
Later on in the video, Blair asked another interesting question about the quality of recent games.
- Why has there been such a difference in quality between various Marvel titles?
“There are many pressures when creating a game, the two biggest ones in this case were time and familiarity. Beenox did a great job making ‘The Amazing Spider Man’ because they’d already had three or four years iterating Spider Man. Raven Software, similarly, had a long history of delivering quality games, as well as working with us. Again, they had familiarity with the character and with Marvel which transferred into the execution of the game. Thor and Iron Man were newer teams that we hadn’t worked with as much, and we had difficulty communicating with them, with brought in the factor of time constraints.”
The full interview video can be found here on G4TV.com.