The Escapist Bulletin: Disney, Marvel, and the best laid plans

"It is a mini-Disney in terms of intellectual property. Disney's got much more highly recognized characters and softer characters, whereas our characters are termed action heroes. But at Marvel we are now in the business of the creation and marketing of characters."

A curiously apt comment from Ronald Perelman, who bought Marvel back in 1989. Marvel has very recently been sold again, this time to media giant Disney. Now, Disney buying Marvel might not sound much like gaming news, but the $4 million deal has more relevance than you might think.

Comic books have sat on the periphery of gaming for as long as the hobby has existed. Those who are sufficiently enthusiastic about video games to label themselves gamers will often have other interests that fall within the 'nerd' oeuvre, be they anime, manga, or indeed, comic books.

It's this correlation between the spheres of gaming and comics that makes the news so important to the gaming community. Not that it's gone down all that well, as Disney has a reputation for wholesomeness that many gamers feel is incompatible with the comics that they love.

In many ways, the near ubiquitous wailing and gnashing of teeth is understandable. It's hard to look at the company that gave the world Hannah Montana and be hopeful that it will leave titles like The Punisher alone.

That attitude, however, betrays a lack of knowledge about the Disney media empire, because while Disney proper might be all about clean, family fun its subsidiary Miramax unleashed movies like Kill Bill and There Will be Blood on the world. What has gamers worried is that Disney might start to fiddle around with Marvel and in doing so change the character of the company.

The thing about the deal is is that while it's interesting to gamers it doesn't seem to have anything to do with games themselves.

Ignoring for a moment that there have been plenty of Disney games, and a lot of them well received by critics, it's still only a half truth. The superhero aesthetic has helped shaped character design, and as the capacity for narrative has increased, the conventions, tropes and unfortunately the cliches of comic books have made their way into the medium.

Marvel is actually a great fit for video games because its characters, while powerful, are decidedly more mortal than DC's stable of ubermensch. Translating Superman into a game means either resorting to things like kryptonite fog or virtual reality, or massively toning down his powers, whereas Spiderman is powerful enough to make a game interesting but vulnerable enough that getting shot is going to ruin his day.

This makes licensed products much easier to do well, but it also makes for a great template that developers can reference and modify as they see fit.

What's significant about this template, though, is that while it's evolving it doesn't have its roots in any one particular comic but in the general style of Marvel over the last 40 years or so. What this means is that the effects of any changes that Disney makes won't be apparent for many years to come as the frame of reference shifts forward.

The big assumption that gamers are making, however, is that Disney is going to start interfering at all. While it's true that Bob Weinstein had dificulties with Disney Execs and creative control, they were often based in budgetary concerns and when you're talking about comics it costs the same to draw Captain America battling the Red Skull as it does to draw him doing his taxes.

Marvel might end up doing the official Jonas Brothers comic, but the trade-off for that is that Marvel is now part of a group that is very good at marketing, and given how important comics are to the development of games, more comic book readers is likely to mean more games.

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