Everyone loves the Marvel superheroes that make up The Avengers, but have you ever wondered what these iconic superheroes were like when they were the age of the average college student? If your answer to this question is somehow “Yes!”, then you’re in luck, as Marvel is teaming up with TinyCo to give us a new mobile video game titled Avengers Academy scheduled to come out later this year.
To celebrate, Marvel hosted an “Avengers Academy Homecoming” in Los Angeles as a way to announce and promote this new game for the press. They had plenty of iPads set up with a demo version of the game. Basically the game is similar to something like Farmville except, instead of a farm, you build a university and have Marvel characters at front and center of the game.
The demo version basically just focused on setting up the world and the characters, but the goal is once you’ve unlocked many characters and locations you’ll be able to do many things from training to fly and trying out weapons to chilling out and playing pool.
Marvel fans will be pleased to know that not only are all the members of The Avengers like Captain America and Hulk playable and that villains like Loki are about to unlocked, but you’ll even be able to play relatively obscure characters not explored in the movies much such as Wasp and Spider-Woman.
Besides the game, TinyCo went above and beyond making this press event feel like a real life homecoming by including many things you’d likely find at such an event. From free drinks and hors d’oeuvre to games like bean bag toss, darts and Jenga Blocks, to even an entire booth where you can make your own school IDs for Avengers Academy (where you can list your name and superpower), it was a cross between freshman orientation and grad night.
There was also a stage complete with a DJ. Our host came to the stage and welcomed us. He showed us both a trailer for the game narrated by Nick Fury as well as a funny video of all the Avengers posing for their yearbook photos. After the videos, two game developers from TinyCo came to the stage and expressed their excitement. They told us when they heard of this idea from Marvel approaching about reimagining the Marvel characters as college-aged students they immediately got exciting and jumped on board, saying they were eager to create a game nobody had ever done before (I refrained my snarky side from shouting out “Monsters University!”). They were also quite excited about the draw of Marvel that’ll inevitably bring new potential customers to TinyCo games. They concluded by giving a shout-out to those setting up the homecoming with one of the guys exclaiming about his wife, “This is the first homecoming I get to bring a hot date to!”
Of course, what’s a homecoming without dressing up? After their promotion of the games they had “some of the world’s most famous cosplayers” come to the stage for a contest. Conveniently, a guy dressed up as Tony Stark and a girl dressed as Wasp ended up winning and becoming “Homecoming King And Queen.”
Bob Iger recently said in a new interview that Marvel (and Star Wars) “will never die as franchises”. TinyCo is helping delivering that with that developing of this new mobile game. If the game at all lives up to that homecoming party (which easily topped all of my school parties), then this game will continue to strengthen the ever beloved Marvel brand.