Just under 97 minutes of gameplay from the open-world Iron Man game Avalanche Studios was building for Disney before it was cancelled in 2012 surfaced August 24 on archive.org, captured from a PlayStation 3 dev kit.
The top comment on the Reddit thread that spread it was relief. Fans read “cancelled Iron Man game” and assumed EA’s was dead.
It isn’t.
This is not the single-player Iron Man game Motive Studio has been developing since EA announced it in September 2022. That project is separate and, per everything EA has said, still in production.
The Avalanche game is the one nobody outside the studio had ever seen.
It’s also not the early-2000s Xbox prototype, The Invincible Iron Man, that a former Genepool Software developer surfaced in 2024.
That makes three Iron Man games nobody has been able to play: Genepool’s, Avalanche’s, and, four years on, Motive’s.
The uploader is a dev kit collector who, according to the Reddit poster, is the same user who recently put out GTA V build and Rockstar Agent files.
He describes the clips as recordings of a restored build from one of his PS3 dev kits. Neither Avalanche nor Marvel has commented, but every detail on screen matches what the studio’s co-founder has said about the project.
It lands in a week already owned by leaks, with Cyberleek’s GTA 6 clips putting Take-Two in federal court. Different uploader, different animal: a 14-year-old cancelled prototype instead of an unreleased $80 game.
What The Footage Shows
Eight videos, labeled dem1 through dem6 with two “e3” variants, run 96 minutes and 56 seconds combined. The dev kit boots to a custom Iron Man theme stamped “TM & © 2012 Marvel” under the hostname “devtool.”
The gameplay is Just Cause with an arc reactor.
Iron Man lifts off from open water and flies toward a target marker 3,360 meters out, across desert mountains that, as the poster notes, look nearly identical to Just Cause 2‘s Panau.
On the ground, a mission sends him through a base of shipping containers and floodlights until a “SAM Site Destroyed!” notification pops.
The armor is the movie’s red and gold, and the flight animation looks far more finished than a build this early has any right to.
The “e3” labels suggest demo builds cut for a show that never happened. That’s a read on the file names, not something the uploader has confirmed.
The Game Disney Killed
Avalanche co-founder Christofer Sundberg first revealed the project in an August 2022 MinnMax interview.
Disney approached the Just Cause studio, the game spent roughly two years in development in Stockholm, and Disney and Marvel pulled the plug around 2012 over what he called “company politics.”
The specifics: Disney wanted a year cut from the schedule, which would have meant hiring 70 to 80 developers Avalanche had no next project for.
Sundberg said agreeing would have “broken the studio completely.” He wouldn’t confirm whether the compressed timeline was about hitting Iron Man 3‘s 2013 release.
He described Arkham-style melee, repulsor blasts, and the ability to take off and fly anywhere. That is exactly what’s in these clips.
Until now, that interview was the only public evidence the game existed. No screenshots, no footage, nothing.
Meanwhile, four years after EA announced Motive’s Iron Man, there is still no trailer, no screenshot, and no release window.
The studio said in 2023 it was building on Unreal Engine 5, and EA reaffirmed the game when it cancelled Black Panther and closed Cliffhanger Games.
When your only public update in four years is “still a priority,” every dead Iron Man game on the internet gets mistaken for yours.
(via r/GamingLeaksAndRumours and archive.org)
