EA Motive’s Canceled Iron Man Game Went Dark for Four Years, Then the Suit Took Off

Electronic Arts spent nearly four years treating Motive Studio’s Iron Man game like a locked workshop. Announced in September 2022 as a single-player action adventure and the first title in a multi-game Marvel deal, the project then went dark. Fans filled the gap with rumors. Some of those rumors said the game was dead. Friday’s leak, and the company’s own reply a few hours later, said otherwise.

A second Iron Man project was ultimately unsuccessful. Avalanche Studios, the Just Cause team, had spent around two years hammering away at an open-world version of back in 2012 when Disney decided to shorten the timeframe and pack it in, resulting in all of that work being lost. Just discovered is/was some very impressive-looking hour-long footage from the old 2013 PlayStation 3 build, which has a certain appeal despite its age. Motives’ second game is a completely different beast (and in much better form), produced in Unreal Engine 5 by a Montreal team that canceled a Dead Space remake before releasing Star Wars Squadrons.

Friday’s footage is a two-and-a-half-minute test reel labeled “August 26.” It appears to be an early video put together for an internal assessment (rather than a polished sales pitch), since some segments still appear to be in alpha, textures are missing, and a couple cutscenes are lighted with placeholder lighting. Still, the clip is the first look anyone outside the studio has had at anything new since the big reveal back in the day.

The flying is what really shines out in the footage, and it sticks out quite a bit. Tony takes off over a busy American city, which you may guess (a street sign identified it as Chicago) and flies through the air like a jet, not a person in a tin can. Combat, on the other hand, appears to be a bit of a mash-up, but not an awful one. Motive appears to have included elements from both their own past and the recent decade of superhero games. Some of the elements, such as dogfighting and close-range combat, seem reminiscent of the Star Squadrons they created last year, while the Batman Arkham games and Spiderman appear to have influenced the overall ‘slamming and taking bullets’ aspect of things. The team has always stated that they intended the flying to feel natural from the start, and Creative Director Ian Frazier spent three years on Squadrons figuring out how to make that feeling work for him, so it appears like his efforts paid off.


Don’t get too excited about seeing Tony Stark up close and personal, however. Motive was unable to obtain the rights to Robert Downey Jr’s likeness, thus it is more of an homage to the character, as evidenced by the stance, grin, and other characteristics. The supporting cast is also heavily influenced by comic books; Pepper Potts appears, as does James Rhodes in his War Machine gear, as do a slew of other characters such as Obadiah Stane, Madame Masque, and the Iron Monger, as well as some others who resemble Crimson Dynamo, Justin Hammer, Whiplash, and others who appear in Iron Man stories. Overall, the design appears to be much more comic book-based than the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which is exactly what Motive said they were striving for back in 2022.

To be honest, it all fell apart after that update in 2024, when EA canceled the Black Panther game, shut down the studio (Cliffhanger games), and then laid off personnel from a few other EA teams. All of a sudden, Marvel-licensed projects began to look a little shaky, so people assumed the Iron Man game had also been canceled. Officially, it was all good to go, or at least that’s what EA said in 2025, as they said it had at least three games in the works and was still on track to ship, with Motive at the helm and Iron Man as the first one out the door, but they never gave a release date, so we were all left hanging.
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