Freedom Force Q&A

The Wargamer has conducted an interview with Irrational Games’ Jonathan Chey, asking the product manager several questins about the recently released Freedom Force. Here’s a bit to get you started:

Q: Freedom Force as a title is a Marvel Comics property, I believe, yet all the super heroes and villains in the game are customized characters unique to Irrational’s game. How did this come to fruition and why did you choose this approach over basing the game around some of the better known heroes by Marvel or perhaps DC Comics in some sort of officially licensed product?

A: Licensing was never really an option for us because we wanted to create a new franchise not re-use someone else’s property. Working with our own characters is far easier because we have the freedom to make them into exactly what we want rather than having to fit into a long and complicated pre-history for that character and universe. A lot of the fun of the product is creating the world from scratch and it would have been much less interesting to be simply re-hashing someone else’s ideas.

Now that we have our own universe established, we can choose exactly how we want it to develop. If we want to kill off a character, we can. If we want to introduce new characters or new stories, we can. We don’t have to ask for anyone else’s permission.