The beauty of the Marvel Multiverse has always been that no matter how many realities there are, they all have fleshed out and often very beloved stories attached to them. Be it the world of Marvel Zombies or Sony's Spider-Man game series, there is always an alternate reality that may be just as popular as the original 616 universe.
One such game series, which has its own sprawling lore, can be found on mobile devices and is a huge hit with fans is the Champions series from Kabam. Starting out as the fighting game MARVEL Contest of Champions, the story has grown past combat and is now entering a new world of RPG and teamwork with MARVEL Realm of Champions. Pulling all the concepts from Marvel's 70+ year history, this new game takes what has been established and creates something entirely new.
We recently had a fun chat with Creative Director Gabriel Frizerra as well as Shane, the Senior Game Designer, where we not only talked about the game itself but even some of the lore of the Marvel comics and how the game ties into Contest of Champions.
Hear our full chat with Gabriel Frizzera using the podcast player below. Marvel fans can also find our chat with Marvel's Spider-Man Peter Parker voice actor Robbie Daymond embedded along with the transcript.
3m 60s
Darth Lexii: Well, you've said one of my favorite terms ever, easter eggs. Is there a favorite one that you would like to give us a hint to?
4m 14s
Gabriel Frizzera: Oh, there's so many. There's an interesting one that people already noticed. We were building Contest with the coming of Fantastic 4. We told the story in Contest with Richard's trying to make all the heroes escape the Contest by bringing Galactus into the equation and then breaking this planet in the middle of the Battle Realm, which opened the universe for them to run back into their own universes. It was a mistake because, with Richards, he is a super-smart guy, but he can be dumb sometimes, and he can't see stuff right in front of him. People eventually figured out that the planet was a planet that had people on it because time was passing faster behind that time zone. People are saying to him, "what did you do? You're bringing Galactus to destroy this planet where there are billions of people living there." Now people are desperately trying to fix it in Contest. That planet, of course, in Battle World is the planet in Realm. And if you watch the trailer for the fourth anniversary where the Silver Surfer comes, and he is looking for the Fantastic 4, he goes through all the different times of the Contest, and one of the things he sees is a planet being formed with a celestial embedded into it. That's actually Battle World forming, and that carries a lot of consequences to the new game. There are many things like that that we were already planting in trailers three or four years ago because we can do those big high definition videos with cool characters like that. So we do that all the time.
6m 48s
Shane: I won't give a specific example, but I could talk about some categories because even some fun stuff and perhaps some more controversial stuff happened on MCOC. Certain characters being a little bit too powerful were made references to and some specific mechanics. Even though MROC is an entirely different game, different genres, we have looked back at MCOC and brought some stuff over where possible. It'll be familiar.
7m 23s
Gabriel Frizzera: That's backward, too, though. Sometimes with telling stories in Contest, we push two characters from MROC into Contest already. People say, where are they coming from? Is this Mysterio's reality? Of course, when you play around, you're going to see Storm, the one that you've seen in Contest, that is a horseman of the Apocalypse. We're also going to see a Sorcerer Supreme in there. In Realm, when you see some of the cut scenes where you see Apocalypse, he is actually sending Storm through this mirror through this portal, and he's sending her into Contest to investigate.
*This article was edited for clarity*
MARVEL Realm of Champions is a bold new imagining of the Marvel Universe that transports players to Battleworld, a forbidden planet forged from many realities, where its uneasy peace is disrupted by the death of Maestro, the God-King. After selecting and fully customizing their Champion with the best gear for the situation, players can team up with other players for epic multiplayer skirmishes in unique Marvel-inspired battle areas and brawl in real-time 3v3 team battles for glory, triumph, and honor.
MARVEL Realm of Champions will be available on December 16th, and pre-registration can be accessed through Google Play or on the official website!