The Marvel Ultimate Alliance series has been dormant, but, for the first time in 10 years, it will soon make a return on Nintendo Switch with Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order. But, how did it become exclusive to the portable home console?
“We have a lot of reverence for the franchise. We knew it was really important to a lot of people. But we also knew that after 10 years of not having another installment, it wasn’t going to be enough to just make a sequel,” Marvel Games vice president and executive producer Mike Jones explained in this month’s Game Informer magazine.
“That’s expected, and we needed something unexpected. So, for the last few years, we were on the lookout for what the might be. And then one day we found our answer.”
Before Nintendo Switch had been revealed to the world, Nintendo of America paid Marvel a visit to share their early hardware plans for the portable home console – a system that could be played anywhere and with anyone, becoming the ideal place for social and shared play experiences.
Jones added: “Once we understood what Nintendo had in store for the next generation of gaming, by the end of the meeting we were on our feet with excitement, going: ‘This is it! This is the next step for Ultimate Alliance.'”
The Marvel team weren’t alone in that belief either, with Nintendo of America’s Bill Trinen sharing that the company felt it was the series’ return on Nintendo Switch was “the perfect fit.”
“There was a mutual feeling that the series itself was one we hadn’t seen in a long time and that we wanted to see it come back,” Trinen explains.
“From a multiplayer perspective, it’s the ability to just set it up and play it anywhere. From a Marvel content perspective, that feels like the perfect fit for the Switch platform because of the multiplayer focus, and because of the versatility of the platform.”
Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order will release exclusively for Nintendo Switch worldwide on July 19th.
