Marvel’s Wolverine, the upcoming game from PlayStation and Insomniac about everyone’s favourite burly lad with claws that’d make any cat feel a bit jealous, has reportedly undergone a leadership reshuffle. Former creative director Brian Horton is no longer attached to the game, having subsequently jumped over to work on the Perfect Dark reboot Xbox has in the works.
Both games are still firmly in the ‘coming at some point’ category of things, with Perfect Dark last having popped up at this summer’s Xbox Showcase with some gameplay, not long after a report had claimed its development hadn’t been going too smoothly. Marvel’s Wolverine, meanwhile, was announced back in 2021, and hasn’t been seen much since, though it did come up in details about last year’s Insomniac hack.
Anyway, according to Game File, developer Brian Horton now forms an interesting little link between the two projects at the two big console makers. Reportedly, Horton, who was named has creative director of Marvel’s Wolverine back when it was announced, has been “off the project since the summer”, having subsequently gone on to take up a creative directorship on Perfect Dark, which is being co-developed by The Initiative and Crystal Dynamics.
An Xbox rep confirmed the latter move to Game file saying that Horton will be “bringing his wealth of experience to the upcoming reboot of the classic secret agent series,” which defintely sounds like corpospeak for being happy to have hired a guy. Horton’s also no stranger to Crystal Dynamics, having previously worked as a game director on Rise of the Tomb Raider there.
His departure has seen a leadership rejigging for Wolverine, with the report citing Marcus Smith and Mike Daly as having taken up the positions of creative director and game director on the game respectively, roles they previously held on Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. Wolverine’s original game director, Cameron Christian, is reportedly staying on at Insominiac in an unspecified “different role”.
The report mentions sources having claimed to the Game File that the leadership switchup on Wolverine is due to creative decisions around the game.
As ever with stuff like this, we’ll likely have to wait a while to see what these moves actually end up meaning for the games in question, and what they’ll actually look like whenever we all finally get to play them. That won’t stop people saying things about their favorite video game box on social media in the interim, but what can you do, eh?
