10 Incredible Video Games You Can't Buy Anymore

Part of the absolute agony of working with a licence as enormous (in content AND worldwide ubiquity) as Marvel is that everything is unbelievably expensive, and licences change hands so frequently.

What this means is, Marvel purportedly gives its best licences to whichever publisher it regards to be the "best" at that time, and then can exert its colossal bulk when it comes to renewal. Depending on how unlimited your big Scrooge McDuck-style gold vault is (and how much selling power you as a publisher have at the time compared to your peers) this might be impossible - and so, Marvel just moves on, and takes all its licences with it.

As a 2006 game, Marvel Ultimate Alliance predates the Iron Man movie by a couple of years, and so Raven Software were working with the IP at a time before the explosion in superhero popularity.

Given just how many superheroes appear in the game - one where the player can create fantasy team-ups in a Diablo-style gameplay format - it really is no surprise that Marvel decided Raven held too many ultra-valuable cards, so took all of their toys off them to reallocate to more prominent, commodious development studios.

Nowadays you have to be a top-five studio to get a sniff of even the Squirrel Girl IP from Marvel. Insanely, the days of several key Marvel heroes crammed into the same game seems more unbelievable than even the Marvel subject matter itself, like a talking gun raccoon and a walking tree fighting purple Bluto with space jewellery.