How tackling the Marvel universe revealed an unexpected new side of the XCOM team

By Alex Spencer

Some missions will demand a certain character is included in your party, to ensure players can’t just stick with their favourites.

Lilith’s demonic army, the Lilin, gives Firaxis a chance to wheel out some XCOMlike enemy designs. They are joined by the Fallen, corrupted versions of familiar heroes and villains

Blade was one of the stars of the ’90s comic series that inspired the dev team

Jake Solomon, creative director

Rumours of a Firaxis Games Marvel title have been circulating since June. Long enough, no doubt, for us all to build up a mental picture of what the XCOM team would do with this licence. Whatever version has been living in your head these past few months, though, know this:

Marvel’s Midnight Suns is not that game.

Rather than the XCOM reskin we might have anticipated, Firaxis has created a game that has as much in common with Slay The Spire and Persona as it does with the studio’s previous releases, one that borrows equally from fighting and dating games, and periodically ditches its trademark turn-based approach for realtime adventuring. But the surprises begin before any of that – right from the first time we see the game’s title.

By this point, Marvel might well be the single most profitable word in the English language. The two that follow it, though? They represent one hell of a deep cut. The game is a loose adaptation of Rise Of The Midnight Sons, a 1992 crossover event which launched such titles as Nightstalkers, Spirits Of Vengeance and Darkhold: Pages From The Book Of Sins. A part of comics history, it’s fair to say, that is not especially well-remembered. Except in the two cases that matter here: self-described “Marvel superfans” Jake Solomon and Chad Rocco, now creative director and director of narrative on Midnight Suns.

The pair grew up on the publisher’s monthly output. “We were reading comics at the same time, so our golden memories of comics come from the same era – the late ’80s, early ’90s,” Solomon tells us. “It was all antiheroes and supernatural stuff and, you know, giant hair.” All of which are very much present in the original Rise Of The Midnight Sons, a story about Ghost Rider battling demons and necromancers alongside Blade and Doctor Strange. “For Rocco and me, this was a formative comic-book event.”

This youthful obsession would provide the solution to a problem Solomon and team never expected to have. “We had never considered the idea of making a Marvel game,” he says. “As much as I personally love Marvel, it just doesn’t even cross your mind.” It was actually Marvel that approached Firaxis, just as the team were wrapping up XCOM 2’s War Of The Chosen expansion. (And that fandom, it seems, runs in both directions. “Honestly, you often hear from execs, ‘Oh yeah, I loved that game’, and maybe they do, and maybe they don’t,” Solomon says. “But the very first call I had, there was an executive vice president of Marvel on the line, and he had very specific feedback about the finale mission of XCOM.”) Without a pitch at the ready, Solomon and Rocco were sent “flipping through decades of Marvel stories in our heads”, searching for the right approach.

Of course, Marvel’s standing today is very different to where it was in the early ’90s – and while its recent successes make this project more viable, Solomon says there is a downside. “The problem being that Marvel is everywhere now. Their movies are the biggest movies in the world, and they have been for over a decade. Now they’re making TV shows, and guess what, they’re the biggest TV shows in the world. There are decades of comics, there are theme park attractions, there are cartoons. They’re just everywhere. As a creative team, that’s actually a challenge, because you really have to find a corner of this universe that you can call your own.”

That’s certainly the case with Midnight Suns, which alongside the familiar faces of Tony Stark and Wolverine features heroes such as Nico Minoru and Illyana ‘Magik’ Rasputin. The threat they are being pitted against is Lilith, an adaptation of an obscure Marvel supervillain (and a sort of twice-removed version of the Biblical figure) rarely sighted since her ’90s heyday. When Solomon tells us this is an “untapped” part of Marvel’s back catalogue, he’s not joking. After all, who else would even think to tap it?