When we started Irrational in 1997, one of the first things we did was draw up a list of games we wanted to make. There were some good concepts, there were some bad concepts, and there were some really bad concepts. One game, however, that we agreed upon was "a cool superhero game." Now while there have been many superhero games produced (just go down the PlayStation section at your nearest Blockbuster to get a sense of this), in our humble opinion, there really hasn't been a game that has caught the feeling we all had when the Avengers took on Ultron and the Fantastic Four duked it out with Galactus.

The existing superhero games generally fell into two categories. First, there were the fighting games, which generally restricted the objects of our affection to 2D side-scrolling rumbles. Where was the snappy dialogue? Where were the toppling skyscrapers? Where was the cool part where the hero picks up a bus and whacks the villain through the façade of Grand Central Station?

Superheroes were about teamwork and the monthly saving of the universe. They weren't context-free slugfests. Our boys in tights weren't getting their due.

Somebody had to do something. And we thought, "Hey! Why shouldn't that somebody be us?"

Why? Well, there was System Shock 2 for starters. That opportunity put our more heroic endeavors on hold for two years or so. It wasn't until earlier this year that we started thinking about our heroes again. By this point, numerous hero games had flared briefly and then disappeared into the oblivion of cancellation. Nobody had staked the claim we thought to be ours. So we threw down the gauntlet...

And nobody picked it up. Numerous publishers looked at our design spec and said, "Yeah? So what?" Which is what smart publishers generally do when they see a design spec. However, we were convinced this one was different.

This one had superheroes!

"So?" the publishers would say.

This one has a fully destructible environment!

"And?" the publishers would say.

"This one will let you build your own heroes and villains in our own character creator with a billion superpowers and other goodies!"

"Next..." the publishers would say.

And then the best possible thing that can happen to a small development company happened. We found a publisher that totally got what we wanted to do. When Mark Burke and Holly Newman at Crave saw our proposal they didn't say, "So?" They didn't say, "And?" And they didn't say, "Next…."

They said, "Yes." They wanted our tactical RPG superhero game. They wanted us to re-create New York and then develop a legion of heroes and villains to whomp the crap out of it.