Marvel’s Greatest Game Is Unplayable 20 Years Later & It’s a Total Shame

11 hours ago 8

Published Feb 10, 2026, 7:16 PM EST

Derek is the Training Lead for ScreenRant. Before his current position, he spent 20 years working in games, TV, and film while also writing for several entertainment sites.
Derek is also the co-host of three pop culture podcasts: Across the Omniverse, The Bad Batch, and Watch Men.

In 2006, two years before Iron Man kicked off the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Activision and Raven Software gave gamers a hint at what the future would hold. A spiritual sequel to X-Men Legends and X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse, Marvel Ultimate Alliance brought together the greatest Marvel heroes to save the universe from Doctor Doom and the Masters of Evil's machinations.

The game was a huge hit, with reviewers and gamers praising the number of characters who appeared in the game - 140 in total with 23 of them being playable - and the gameplay itself. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 followed three years later, and 2019 saw the release of a Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order, available only on the Nintendo Switch.

Both sequels were met with tepid responses, but they couldn't tarnish the legacy of the original, which still shines as the best Marvel game to feature the whole universe of characters. Sadly, the chances of Marvel Ultimate Alliance ever being playable to future generations are slim.

Licensing Issues Have Stopped Marvel's Heroes

Activision's relationship with Marvel started all the way back in 1986 when the game publisher released Howard the Duck to coincide with the movie. It would be 14 years before the two companies worked together again, but from 2000 to 2014, the partnership would result in almost 40 games, including some of the best Marvel games ever made.

And while a number of great games came out of this partnership, the licensing deal ended and, with it, all of Activision's games based on Marvel's characters disappeared from online stores over time. Amazing Spider-Man 2, the last Marvel game Activision made, was released in 2014 and pulled from online stores in 2017.

Ever since then, no Marvel game that was published by Activision has been playable. Even backward compatibility was pulled for the titles, meaning if you have them on disc, you need to also have whatever console they were originally released on in order to play it. And, as older consoles become rarer with time, that means these games, and especially Ultimate Alliance, will be lost to time.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance's Success Is Unlikely To Be Repeated

Marvel Ultimate Alliance Team Selection Screen

While games have become infinitely bigger and consoles and PC infinitely more powerful since Marvel Ultimate Alliance was first released, it may seem like recreating the game under a different name would be easy, but the truth is that, like any good art, what made the game great was lightning in a bottle.

It was the specific people who made Ultimate Alliance - the dev team at Raven, the publishing and QA teams at Activision, and everyone at Marvel who had to sign off on the characters that were used - that made the game work. That magic can never be replicated in the same way, and without it, no one can ever quite capture what made the game so great in the first place.

And while video game preservation has become an issue in recent years, with groups like the Videogame Heritage Society in the UK and Japan's Game Preservation Society are working to make sure older games are never lost, there is still a long way to go to making sure that every game is available to the masses in the same way movies and TV shows are.