Comicbook.com just put together a list of forgotten Marvel games from the 2000s, and it hit me square in the nostalgia. The 2000s were a weird, wonderful time for Marvel. Before the MCU made every character a household name, the games division was just throwing stuff at the wall, and a lot of it stuck for a hot minute before quietly sliding off.

That decade gave us genuine classics too, don't get me wrong. X-Men Legends and Marvel Ultimate Alliance were basically the MMO-adjacent couch co-op dreams of their era. I sank entire weekends into Ultimate Alliance with my old college crew, four of us crammed into a dorm room arguing over who got to be Wolverine. Again.

But for every Ultimate Alliance, there were a handful of titles that came and went so fast even Marvel fans blink at them now. That's what the Comicbook.com piece digs into, and it's worth a read, because some of these are genuinely fascinating time capsules from before superhero games had a consistent identity.

What gets me about this era is how much experimentation was happening. Publishers weren't locked into the 'cinematic universe' formula yet, so you got weird one-offs, licensed oddities, and games built around single characters who probably didn't need a solo title. Some were rushed movie tie-ins. Some were ambitious swings that just didn't land commercially. Almost all of them are now stuck on hardware you'd have to dig out of a closet to play, which is its own small tragedy.

And that's the part that sticks with me. We talk a lot about game preservation around fan recoveries and delisted PC titles, but the 2000s licensed console game is quietly one of the most endangered species in gaming. No PC port, no digital re-release, no backwards compatibility slot. If you want to replay some of these, you're hunting eBay for a disc and praying your old console still boots.

The 2000s were also the last era where a Marvel game could genuinely surprise you. No established formula, no expectations, just a studio, a license, and a prayer. Sometimes that gave you gold. Sometimes it gave you something you'd completely forgotten until a list like this jogs the memory.

I won't spoil the full list, because the article earns the click, but go skim it and see how many you actually remember. Then come back and tell me: what's the Marvel game from that era that YOU think deserved better? I know mine. It involves a certain web-slinger and a tie-in that outperformed its movie by a mile.