Raven Software’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine – Uncaged Edition is one of the greatest movie tie-in games ever made. The first real look at what the brutality of Wolverine could achieve, the game is still a beloved hack-and-slash game 17 years after its initial release on Xbox, PlayStation, and PC.
Based on a universally disliked movie, X-Men Origins: Wolverine is beloved by fans, and appears to be inspiring the brutality of Insomniac Games’ upcoming Marvel’s Wolverine. However, while the end product is fantastic, crafting the brutal action game was not easy.
Speaking to FRVR, producer Keith Fuller, who now runs Fuller Game Production, explained that working on a movie tie-in game back in the day usually came with a “guaranteed amount of money”, but also “you are almost guaranteed that it’s going to be, probably, not a great movie and you won’t get a chance to do anything justice in your work”.
Nevertheless, the team at Raven, who had just wrapped up work on Marvel Ultimate Alliance, “leapt at the opportunity because it’s freaking Wolverine and no one had done that yet”, but working on the game was harder than expected due to the chaotic production of the movie it was based on.
“It was harrowing to go through that process,” Fuller explained. “Had they made the movie and then they’re like, ‘hey, do the game’—different story. The fact that they were still crafting the script as they were recording parts of the movie and we’re trying to make the game, that was really difficult.”
Fuller explained that characters and locations would be moved, have their roles changed, or just replaced entirely. While this may be easier for a movie production, making sweeping changes like that is hell for game development. “I can tel; you that when they remove a character and replace it with somebody else, that’s easy enough to recast somebody and put a different costume on them,” Fuller continued, “but, for us, that’s weeks of work creating the skeleton, the mode, the textures, and doing the motion capture, and all these sorts of things”.
While most movie tie-in games either had their own plans to develop a side story or were based on a pretty concrete script, Fuller explains that Raven was “trying to build a house on shifting sands”. It was a painful process, but the team ended up creating a fantastic game regardless of the movie’s quality.
“I will contend to this day, it may be—I mean, in the top three for sure—[it] may be the best instance of a movie tie-in where the game was better than the movie,” Fuller claimed, a claim that nobody would ever dare to challenge.
While X-Men Origins: Wolverine isn’t the best video game ever made, it was fun, and unique enough to the point where the game is still help in high regard by fans today. It’s the de facto Wolverine video game, at least until Insomniac’s game gets here, and one that fans will likely always remember.
Nowadays, movie tie-in games are essentially dead in the water, which Fuller believes is due to the sheer cost of game development nowadays. “I think it has a lot to do with that if you want a game that is going to have the quality to it that an X-Men Origins: Wolverine would in this day and age, that is, I mean, you’re looking down the barrel of 300 million dollar budget to develop that,” Fuller says.
Movie tie-in games are a relic of the past, and they didn’t live much longer after X-Men Origins: Wolverine’s release. There was no Days of Future Past tie-in game, Marvel’s Avenger’s didn’t even receive a video game adaptation. Despite that, for the generation that grew up with movie tie-in games, some of them left a huge impact.
