The Best X-Men Games No One Played

5. Before Marvel Ultimate Alliance, There Was X-Men

Wolverine Sabretooth X-Men Legends
Marvel

So, picture this: it's 2004, Fox Kids still rules children's TV, and the X-Men are everywhere. Not content with re-runs of the formidable nineties cartoon, Marvel also air another series called X-Men: Evolution. Fox have back-to-back success at the box office with X-Men and X2: X-Men United, and Joss Whedon is in the midst of his own comics series based on the team, dubbed Astonishing X-Men.

In short, the X-Men craze is still going strong, and was long into its second decade as Marvel's most bankable property. Unfortunately it was also a period marred by uninspiring tie-in video games. Now the X-Men were more fortunate than most in that they had actually featured in several great titles by this point in time, including the iconic nineties arcade game, Marvel vs Capcom, and later X2: Wolverine's revenge, a tie-in for the film that boasted a completely original story, written by legendary comics writer Larry Hama.

Be that as it may, genuinely great comic book video games were few and far between, with Spider-Man 2 the only one to really show the potential comic book properties had in the gaming medium. The X-Men, comparatively, were yet to find the same kind of title.

Today's Raven Software is sadly no longer the studio it once was - an unfortunate casualty of Activision's obsession with Call of Duty - but back in the early noughties they were on the up. Raven led development on the seminal Jedi Knight games for LucasArts, and quickly carved out a niche as a studio capable of adapting licenses into good - if not great - video games. The X-Men were next on the agenda, and the end result ended up being so much more than just a decent dungeon crawler - it became a fantastic introduction to Marvel Comics.

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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.