A new Wolverine game? From Insomniac, careful and conscientious crafters of recent PlayStation blockbusters Spider-Man and Miles Morales? Sign me up, bub, even after that briefest of cinematic trailers where all you really see of Marvel’s prickly brawler is a scruffy lumberjack shirt, a battered cowboy hat and the familiar “snikt” of adamantium blades popping out of bloodied knuckles. This unexpected comeback for the hirsute, hair-trigger mutant – in a proper PlayStation 5 game, not just as a Fortnite skin – harks back to the period where Wolverine was a permanent fixture. (Or to put it another way: when it came to gaming, Logan had a pretty good run.)
As well as rounding out the mutant cast of dozens of X-Men games, Wolverine’s wild popularity as a solo comic character meant he also headlined his own titles. While hardly all-time classics, some had their enjoyable quirks (it’s worth seeking out the raucous SNES soundtrack to 1994’s Wolverine: Adamantium Rage, which sounds like the dawn of drill.) It is unlikely that Insomniac – a studio that could reasonably claim to be the best there is at what they do, which is making triple-A games about Marvel superheroes – will be poring over Logan’s back catalogue of Game Boy Colour titles in search of inspiration. But maybe reexamining the last proper high-profile Wolverine game could throw up some useful pointers.
That was the 2009 movie tie-in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which was official enough that it featured Hugh Jackman’s ripped likeness and gravelly voice honed by almost a decade in the role. (“I was just starting to have fun,” he growls at one point, after eviscerating several unfortunate henchman.) But there was a distinct sense that developers Raven Software – steeped in comics lore while creating the X-Men: Legends and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance action-RPG franchises in the 2000s – wanted to strike out on their own. (This was just before the release of Raven’s Call of Duty: Black Ops, which saw the studio become enmeshed in the demanding, rotational grind of Activision’s CoD war machine.)
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