Catching up with Marvel Rivals' writer Alex Irvine

Catching up with Marvel Rivals’ writer Alex Irvine

Talking storytelling in games, comics, and more!

Marvel Rivals getting ready to squabble.

Introduction

Hi y’all. I’m Patrick Curry, a game designer and entrepreneur from Austin, TX. Many years ago when I was working at Disney, I had the opportunity to collaborate with an amazing team of video game and comic book creators as we endeavored to create a series of new Marvel games connected in both gameplay and storyline. Some of those games even got released, like Wideload’s Avengers Initiative and Playdom’s Avengers Alliance.

I was recently catching up with Alex Irvine, one of the multi-talented writers I worked with in this era, and we took a fun trip down memory lane together. It should be no surprise that a professional storyteller is a fun person to talk with, and he always inspires me with tidbits about his life and career, as well as his perspective on writing, games, and the industry.

You may not have heard of Alex Irvine, but you’ve almost certainly played one of the video games he’s penned over the years. His CV is legendary, and our mutual friends joke that he may be the most read writer of Marvel stories, considering the millions of players who have played these video games, and the huge amount of content in each of them. A script for just one Marvel video game is hundreds of thousands of words long!

So of course Marvel Rivals came up in our conversation, which Alex was the lead writer on. I jokingly suggested that I should interview him about his experience working on the game, and to my surprise, Alex was down! He’s honestly one of the most humble and earnest people I know, and I’m really honored that he let me interview him about Rivals, the other games he’s worked on, and his career in general.

I hope you enjoy reading this transcript of our conversation! My questions are in bold, and Alex’s answers follow.

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Hi, Alex! I know how I would introduce you, but how do you introduce yourself professionally these days?

Well, I’m a writer of books, comics, games, and various other things. I’ve been a full-time freelancer for fifteen years, since leaving the University of Maine, where I was an English professor. I live in Maine. As you can tell from that intro, I am a whiz at self-promotion.

Alex Irvine looking very nautical. Photo by Matt Kaplan.

Haha! You’re such an enigma.

In fact, that’s a big part why I wanted to interview you! Your fingerprints are all over the game industry, but you like to remain in the shadows. Plus, you wrote one of my favorite comic books. (More about this later!)

But first – congratulations on the success of Marvel Rivals! 20 million players in only a month!!! It’s a great game, and I’m so excited for you and the development team. What’s it been like seeing folks’ reactions to the game?

It’s fantastic. When you put so much time into something, the moment it finally appears in the world is both wonderful and nerve-wracking, because you want people to enjoy playing it as much as you loved working on it. With Rivals, that seems to be happening, so rock on!

How did you first get involved in the project that would become Marvel Rivals?

I had done several Marvel games with NetEase when Rivals was first conceived, so it was just a continuation of our existing working relationship — which was really good and fruitful. Danny Koo used to joke that I was basically NetEase’s Marvel staff writer. Before Rivals, we did a couple games that came out, and one that I don’t think was announced. So when Marvel said they had this new game that needed a story, I dove in and got to work.

Going further back in time, before you wrote Marvel video games, you wrote some Marvel comics, right?

I did, yeah. My first Marvel comic was a Hellstorm MAX mini. Then I did Daredevil Noir and Iron Man: Rapture. After that I was doing so many games I kind of lost track of working on comics for a while. It would be fun to do it again, though. The first time you see a Marvel comic with your name on it really is a dream come true.

I have to gush on Daredevil Noir for a minute! I’m a huge fan of that book, and had already read it before we met. In fact, when Disney bought Marvel, the very first game I pitched to the execs was a Marvel Noir game! It was one of the few corners of the Marvel universe that Activision and Sega didn’t have exclusive rights to, and I still think it would make for an amazing game world.

How did Daredevil Noir come into existence?

First of all, thanks! I like that book too. Tomm Coker’s art is brilliant. He and I worked together again on The Comic Book Story of Baseball. I love everything he does.

Cover to Daredevil Noir #1.

While we were working on the Hellstorm book, my editor Axel Alonso asked me if I had any other ideas. I pitched him a Daredevil idea, and he suggested it would be a good fit for the Noir line, which Marvel was planning then. (Our friend Fred Van Lente did a really cool X-Men Noir book.) I tinkered with the initial idea a little to take advantage of the Prohibition-era setting, and off we went.

I had no idea you pitched a Noirverse game!? That would have been amazing.

I know right?! It’s such a fun setting, and also so unlike the bulk of existing superhero stories and games.

Getting back to writing video games, what was the first video game you worked on with Marvel?

That would be Avengers Alliance, which was called Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. when I started working on it in late 2010.

Awesome, that’s the era when we met and started working together. How did you get involved in Avengers Alliance?

Through science fiction, I happened to know Marc Laidlaw because we published stories in some of the same magazines and ran into each other at a convention once in a while. I didn’t even know he wrote games; I knew him as one of the original cyberpunks from the legendary Mirrorshades anthology, which I read to pieces when I was a teenager. He emailed me one day asking if I had done any work for Marvel. I said yeah, and he said a friend of his, Chia Chin Lee, had a license to do a Marvel game that needed a writer. Presto! Things went from there.

Ok wait… this is a huge flex. You just happened to know Marc Laidlaw, the writer of the Half-Life games, one of the greatest video game series ever made, and he played matchmaker for this gig. That’s incredible, but also an entirely believable story coming from you.

Marc’s a great guy, and even if he had never connected me with games I would still be glad to count him as a friend. Everybody should read his fiction, beginning with Dad’s Nuke.

Avengers Alliance was a huge hit and in live service on mobile and Facebook for years and years. What do you think made it so special?

First and foremost, the gameplay was really fun. There were so many characters and character combinations that anybody could build a team of favorites, hop on the Helicarrier, and save the world. The story and dialogue were pretty good too (he said modestly).

Most of the playable characters in Avengers Alliance.

I had such fun writing that game and coming up with new stories. It was about six years of work overall from the time I joined the project until the tragic sunset of the game…and there were more stories in the hopper. One of the really fun things about writing that game was the storytelling room for both season-long arcs and the shorter, time-limited Special Operations.

Tell me about the difference. What’s it like writing a big arc compared to shorter burst stories in a live service game?

The main difference is that the shorter time-limited stories have a beginning, middle, and end. What happens within them doesn’t always have an effect on the main game story because not every player can complete them. The main story is a whole fabric of interwoven threads, across many different locations, using dozens of characters. It’s more like a novel, or a serial story like a comic series, whereas SpecOps were self-contained short stories.

From our many conversations, I know you grew up reading comics. Do you have a favorite era of Marvel storylines? Are there writers or editors who you think most influenced your take on the Marvel mythology?

My absolute favorite Marvel comics involve some combination of Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, and Devil Dinosaur. Also I love Bill Mantlo’s Micronauts comics, ROM Spaceknight, and Godzilla. Even as a kid, I appreciated both weird original storytelling and licensed adaptations. Clearly this foreshadowed how I make my living now.

Had you done any game writing before Avengers Alliance?

I had worked on a couple of casual games, but my big game experience before Avengers Alliance was working on ARGs (alternative reality games). I was part of the writing team on both The Beast and I Love Bees. They were created to promote Steven Spielberg’s AI and Halo 2, respectively. So I kind of transitioned from fiction through the weird multimedia / transmedia of ARGs into more conventional games.

That career transition makes sense to me! ARGs are similar to video games in that the player can experience the story in many different ways, often getting bits of the story in their own unique sequence of events. The Beast and I Love Bees were crazy phenomena at the time, in part because you could only “play” them in these limited time windows when they were released.

They were amazing to work on, too. When we launched The Beast, we all sat back and said, “Cool, now we can relax for a minute. It’ll take people at least a couple of weeks to solve all those puzzles.” Then the players formed groups (hey Cloudmakers!) and solved all the puzzles in like a couple of days. From that point forward, working on The Beast was like the game version of improv theater. We would put stuff out, players would do something unexpected, and I would get (for example) a phone call at midnight from Pete Fenlon or Sean Stewart, needing me to (for example) come up with a fake web site for a hat shop in Pittsburgh that had to go live in two hours. What a blast that was. Same with I Love Bees. I will never again have a job that involves emailing friends all over the world and asking them to go find pay phones in their areas that accept incoming calls. (IYKYK.)

What did you get up to between your first Marvel game, Avengers Alliance, and the recent hit that is Rivals? I don’t think MobyGames lists a fraction of what you’ve worked on, does it?

I believe the complete list of Marvel games I wrote on is:

Avengers Alliance

Avengers Alliance Tactics

Marvel Puzzle Quest

Marvel War of Heroes

Marvel Battle Lines

Marvel Super War

Marvel Duel

Marvel Rivals

But I feel like I’m forgetting at least one.

Those are all Marvel games! Didn’t you work on some Walking Dead and Deus Ex projects too?

I did some comics for Deus Ex, and various transmedia things for Starcraft and The Division. And I wrote the game The Walking Dead: Road to Survival for four years. That was fun because we exhausted the comic story in the first year or so, which meant I got to create a ton of new characters and stories in the Walking Dead universe.

Splash screen to TWD Road to Survival.

Beyond licensed games, I wrote a fun story for a game called Space Punks, but most of it was carved out at the last minute because Flying Wild Hog was under a lot of pressure to get the game out. And I did a ton of early work on New World, the Amazon game – for our mutual friend Patrick Moran – building a whole secret occult history of European exploration and colonialism while also trying (with Patrick’s help and support) to make the original concept less…how do I put this?...let’s say problematic.

Also I did some story and world development on Project Titan, which later became Overwatch. Blizzard offered me the lead writer job on that project, but I didn’t want to move across the country from my kids, so I turned it down. People often look at me funny when I mention that.

Getting back to Marvel Rivals, it’s not a linear storyline game like Insomniac’s Spider-Man with a beginning, middle, and end. It’s a competitive multiplayer game, with rounds of combat played over and over again. How do you approach writing and storytelling for a game with a non-linear structure like this?

There’s a certain amount of environmental storytelling you can do just with the locations, and details of the maps. Then you have the conversations between characters to do some scene-setting. The game is so fast that you can’t really do a lot of storytelling during the combats, so that’s why the character backstories and other material exists: to flesh out the world in between missions and give you a sense of what you’re fighting for.

Are there any callbacks or Easter eggs in Marvel Rivals connecting to these Marvel games you’ve worked on? Does Isotope 8 make an appearance?

I try not to repeat myself too much, but I’ve probably written 200,000 lines of dialogue for Marvel games, so I probably put in a bunch of callbacks completely by accident!

Ahem.

What I mean is, of course! The sharp-eyed player will doubtless be able to pick them out.

And no, unfortunately, our OG Marvel Games brainchild Iso-8 does not make an appearance. But I did create a new resource for this game: Chronovium!

Did you have favorite characters or moments to write for Marvel Rivals?

Of the announced characters, Spider-Man is always fun to write. Also I like Loki, with a little subtlety and nuance. And it was fun to have characters interact with Jeff the Landshark even though his dialogue options are pretty limited – in that way, writing Jeff is a lot like writing Groot.

I also wrote several cutscenes for later in the story. Here’s hoping they appear in future seasons!

Spider-Man getting in on the action in Rivals.

What’s the back and forth look like on a project like Marvel Rivals? Are you turning in scripts and getting notes? Is the design team asking you for scenes or lines?

It changed over time. The first thing I did was take Marvel and NetEase’s initial idea seeds and grow them into a story world. That’s where the two Dooms came from, and the Timestream Entanglement, and Chronovium. In that initial phase I also came up with a bunch of possibilities for locations, including Yggsgard, and several others that haven’t been officially announced yet. Marvel and NetEase had plenty of other ideas for locations too, of course, so we worked up a big list and then winnowed it down.

Then, as the character roster firmed up, it was time to start writing dialogue. In a game like Rivals, most dialogue is occasional, i.e. triggered by a specific action or event. So NetEase listed all of those occasions, and I wrote batches of lines for each. Over the four years I worked on Rivals, the occasions developed, so that was a multi-stage process that came to include conversations between characters. That was fun, because in a game like this there sometimes isn’t a lot of room for character work. Overall I think I wrote about 40,000 lines of dialogue for Rivals. Marc Sumerak came on board to help ship the game, writing some added dialogue and lore material.

I also wrote prose background stories for many of the characters, telling the story of the first moments of the Timestream Entanglement as experienced by those characters and the people around them in their specific universes.

As far as back-and-forth, it was pretty collaborative. I would write dialogue, NetEase and Marvel would give notes, we might argue a little about some of the notes, and then I would revise. One learning curve was me adapting to the specific needs of a Chinese company; for example, you will find very few references to death and killing in the dialogue, even from the Punisher or the Winter Soldier, because those tend to run counter to the tastes and standards of the Chinese authorities, who ultimately approve games for release in that country.

Here’s a hotly debated topic… Did you have input on which characters were featured or playable in Marvel Rivals?

A little, but not the final say. Note the absence of Devil Dinosaur and Vincent Stegron.

Oh I know you love Devil Dinosaur! My son wants to know, which playable character is your favorite to play in Rivals?

I’m usually terrible at games like Rivals, so I’ll try anyone! I tend to main characters I like from the comics the most, like Doctor Strange and the Scarlet Witch.

Doctor Strange about to portal across the map.

How much did other games come up during your work on Marvel Rivals for reference and inspiration? Overwatch is a natural comparison, but I see bits of Team Fortress 2 and Super Monday Night Combat in there too. Any others?

That’s really a question for the designers more than me. All I can tell you is that everyone was trying to learn from the existing great games of this kind, and then use that learning to make something even greater if possible.

Are you still working on Marvel Rivals? What’s next for the game and storyline?

I moved on shortly before the beta released. I’d been working on it for four years and other projects were calling. The Rivals storyline I wrote goes on for several seasons, but probably time-traveling ninjas from Tokyo 2099 would kill me if I said anything about it.

Ok I won’t dig in for anymore Rivals spoilers!

This might be a difficult question, considering the breadth of games and books you’ve written. But what’s a favorite fictional universe that you haven’t had the chance to write in yet?

Fallout! Somebody call me. Also Micronauts.

Oooh, do you know what you would do if given the creative reins of Fallout or Micronauts?

Oh yes. Of course. I am totally not a superstitious person, but I’m not going to jinx myself by telling anyone.

Fair enough!

And my daughter wants to know, if you returned to comics to write any one Marvel or DC character, who would it be?

Doctor Strange for Marvel, no question. I was working on a cool Doctor Strange idea with Axel for a while, but it never happened, alas. For DC…if it wasn’t going to be Batman (and I’ve already written a couple of Batman novels), I would totally go for Challengers of the Unknown.

Looking back, do you have a single favorite thing that you’ve written? If so, what is it?

Jeez, what an impossible question. I’ve written some short stories I’m really proud of. That’s one reason I like writing short stories: you can get them right. You can never get a novel all the way right, you just get it to the point where you’re exhausted and it’s good enough. At least that’s been my experience. Novels are such huge baggy monsters, there’s always more to do.

Thus I evade your question.

You remain very sneaky.

Do you have time to write for yourself? Cooking up any new original stories and worlds lately?

I’m always working on new stuff. I have a couple of novels going, a bucketful of short stories, a comic script or two…and I just finished a full-length kids graphic novel called A POCKET GUIDE TO SPACE MONSTERS. We’ll see what happens with that.

Also I just did a bunch of world-building and story development for a new game, as yet unannounced, that I hope will be making a splash in the near future.

Awesome. I can’t wait to hear more about those projects. And there’s also the stuff we’ve been working on together, which remains in the super-secret vault for now.

What advice do you give to up-and-coming writers of fiction and video games?

Don’t try to write for a market. Write the stories you wish existed in the world, the stories you have always wanted to read. Then figure out what to do with them. As my brilliant writer pal Jeff Ford once said: “Only by forgetting about the money did I ever make any money.” This is probably better advice for fiction than for video games.

The exception, of course, is when someone hires you to do something specific, in which case you should do it. But do it your way.

Also, turn things in on time and don’t be a jerk. Even if you’re a good writer, people are much less likely to want to work with you if you’re unreliable or unpleasant.

Is there anything you wish you knew much earlier in your career?

I don’t know, I feel like careers are such individual things that I can’t always see how knowing a particular thing sooner would have helped. Maybe that knowledge would have made me act differently and screw up some other opportunity. One piece of advice I would pass on is this: Try everything. I have always made a point of saying yes to new opportunities in any genre or form, just to see what they were like and figure out new ways of storytelling. It keeps you flexible, engaged, always learning.

I think that’s great advice. Be open to opportunities and success that you didn’t necessarily go out there searching for.

Where can people find more of your writing online?

A lot of my short stories have been published online. Take a peek at the Free Reads page on my website.

And last question… what’s the best way for folks to stay in touch and follow your work?

alex-irvine.com — I’m not on social media so I make a good-faith effort to keep that site updated. But as I previously mentioned, I am bad at self-promotion.

Well, I’m sure Marvel Rivals is going to help get the word out!

Spider-people and mutants team-up!

Alex, thank you so much for doing this interview! I learn something every time we talk shop, and I’m always impressed with your ability to pull out crazy nuggets I haven’t heard before. Best of luck to you on your new projects, to Danny and all our pals still working on Marvel Rivals, and to everyone out there striving to tell great stories and make awesome games!

Thanks for the conversation, Patrick! Next I will interview you.

Sold! Until then.