This summer saw the release of Fantastic Four: First Steps, bringing Marvel’s first family to the MCU in their latest outing on the silver screen. However, it’s not the only screen the superhero team will be gracing, with new cosmetics coming to games like Fortnite and Marvel Rivals, and special events taking place in Marvel’s many mobile games, such as Marvel Contest of Champions.
At a Fantastic Four fan event held at Hollywood’s El Capitan Theatre, I had the opportunity to speak with Tyler Nicol, also known as Vin_Cent, the Principal Creative Writer on Marvel Contest of Champions, a mobile fighting game developed by Kabam. We discussed how new movies and comics influence Marvel Contest of Champions’ story, the impact on the fanbase, and what players should take away from their time with the game.
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Within comics, and in Marvel Comics especially, there are always many layers to storytelling. With their proclivity for multiverse-spanning stories, including the MCU’s own Multiverse Saga, there are threads upon threads overlapping to create a massive web of history. As a result, each character has the potential to appear in various roles across movies, comics, games, and more.
Tyler Nicol has a wealth of Marvel history at his fingertips.
This history, spanning decades, provides a vast reservoir of information from which Nicol is happy to draw. “I try to draw as much inspiration from that as I can. For Marvel Contest of Champions, we’re very lucky that it is a multiverse, so we got comic characters, we got movie characters, we got all sorts.”
Of course, with dozens of iterations of fan favorite characters at your disposal, it can be tempting to cram thirty versions of Deadpool into the Marvel Contest of Champions, but Nicol acknowledges the need for restraint. One of the important aspects of including a character, he says, is “figuring out how they fit into the larger world of the battle realm and the Contest of Champions itself.”
But there are other ways to let your fandom shine when you’re writing characters, he continues, “It’s a fun little dance of like ‘How many references can I get in for the other superfans as a wink, but also telling a story that- these characters might be fresh and new to an audience,’ so I get to kind of balance it between there.” Indeed, every comic could be someone’s first issue, so it’s important not to alienate new readers fresh out of a movie theater, a principle that appears to hold in other media.
Marvel Contest of Champions helps introduce new fans to unfamiliar characters.
During the fan event, I had the chance to play as one of the members of the Fantastic Four or even Galen, an alternate, heroic version of Galactus, in a fight against the Silver Surfer. When I checked my watch, it was Clobberin’ Time, so I picked The Thing and used a series of swipes and taps to unleash a flurry of rocky blows, eventually defeating the Chrome Herald of Galactus.
This got me wondering, since this was part of an event to celebrate the film’s release, how much does a major motion picture affect the storytelling in a mobile game? Are the writers expected to unceremoniously shoehorn the subject of the latest film into their game’s story? Nicol clarified that these events are usually smaller side-stories, but that major releases are still seen more as a boon than a hindrance. “Being part of the Marvel family means we always get the joy of the boost of fandom when a new project does come out. Again, we’ve had the Fantastic Four in our game since 2019, but with [Fantastic Four: First Steps] we are getting new fans in…”
He sees Marvel Contest of Champions as an opportunity to help introduce new fans to unfamiliar characters, using the heroic team from the film as a link, “…with the introduction this month of the Maker and High Evolutionary, I get a big opportunity to introduce some more rare villains that people might not know specifically from the films, while also trying to keep some of the lore and joy of that film in it.” Nicol also reiterates the fun in finding the balance, “It’s, again, kind of that back and forth of ‘Fun for someone new, satisfying for older [fans] who want the references.’”
Tyler Nicol wants you to go on new adventures with familiar characters you know and love.
Ultimately, Tyler Nicol appears to love playing with the characters and worlds of Marvel Contest of Champions as much as he loves writing them. He hopes other players, new and old, share in this enthusiasm, saying, “…I want them to come away […]seeing us as another branch of this wonderful universe. Because we do get to tell our own stories, we do get to take our own journeys, so everything with this is always complementary and growing off of the other multiverses, the other opportunities, the other stories.
Nicol continued, “I want you to have that familiarity, like I know and love these characters, and I want to go on a new adventure with them. That’s something we bring every month to Marvel Contest of Champions.”
You can experience Marvel Contest of Champions’ new Dimensional Arcade: Doom Cycle until August 24th for the chance to add Doombots to your collection of champions.
Marvel Contest of Champions is available on PC, iOS, and Android.
