By Courtney Potter
Looking to immerse yourself in the world of Marvel Super Heroes like never before? Marvel Rivals is a cooperative, Super Hero team-based PvP online shooter game where players can assemble an ever-evolving all-star squad of Super Heroes and Super Villains—all while battling with unique superpowers across an electric lineup of destructible maps from across the Marvel Multiverse. Players can pick from a wide variety of fan-favorite and cult-classic names from across the Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, X-Men, and many more.
These character combinations bring exciting (and surprising!) team-up skills to iconic Marvel worlds, where players will find countless ways to use the environment to claim victory. The Marvel Multiverse offers infinite possibilities… and seasonal drops introduce new Super Heroes to the battlefield along with challenging and diverse maps and other fresh content to unlock across assorted gameplay strategies.
And speaking of seasonal drops: At the recent Marvel Rivals Assemble fan event, held at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood, CA, the game revealed its “Path to Doomsday”—during which new game modes and in-game events, inspired by The Infinity Saga, will arrive from April through October. Then, in December, they’ll be “igniting the battlefield” with all-new in-game content to celebrate the release of Marvel Studios’ Avengers: Doomsday.
D23 recently sat down with Marvel Games executive producer Danny Koo—one of the folks behind Marvel Rivals—for an exclusive chat about not only the creation of the game, but what to expect from the “Path to Doomsday”. Read on for more…
D23: Thanks for chatting with us, Danny! We’re curious—did you set out to work in online gaming? What was your career trajectory?
Danny Koo (DK): I’ve been in the game industry for over 22 years now, right after college. I immediately signed up for the lowest position that you can find in the games industry and worked my way up. I’m very passionate about having fun in gaming—and also very passionate about helping a team to come together and achieve great stuff in whatever they do, whether that’s shipping a game; making great designs; or telling great stories. Through all my accumulated experience, I found my calling of being able to advise teams on what to do, what not to do, in a lot of our hit games with my visibility on a lot of different games at one time. I’m very well attuned with the gaming industry—I can see the battlefield, no pun intended.
D23: Very cool! And how long have you been with the Marvel Rivals team, specifically?
DK: I’ve been involved all the way from the concept green-lighting process for this title until now—since the beginning. It started off with meeting with the development team back in 2019, where we sat down and we asked them, ‘What is your passion? What do you want to do? What kind of Marvel games do you want to make?’ And this young team, they used to play games like Overwatch and Counter-Strike growing up—and now they’re in the workforce. They want to make games that they want to play themselves. So we took up the challenge and worked with them to ideate and prototype it—and it happened all the way through the COVID-19 pandemic, and that is the blockbuster game you see today. This game was done majority during the pandemic, remotely; we hadn’t actually met the team in person until a few months before we announced the game in 2024.
D23: Wow! That’s pretty amazing. So can you give us a rundown of the announcements that were made at the Marvel Rivals Assemble event earlier this month? What fans can expect with the “Path to Doomsday” and what’s to come through the rest of 2026?
DK: This year, we’re going to continue to have new playable Super Heroes, new costumes, new maps, new game modes. That is our promise, consistently, throughout the development and release of this title. Now, on top of that, because we know Avengers: Doomsday is going to be such an iconic return of the franchise—and we know players love the Avengers franchise—we collaborated with Marvel Studios and all our internal business units to come up with a great event for players of Marvel Rivals to also appreciate. We want to refresh everybody’s memory, and have a bit of nostalgia, for the previous Avengers films. So with that, on top of the already exciting 2026 lineup, we introduced the “Path to Doomsday”—where we go through iconic scenes from The Avengers, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Avengers: Infinity War, and Avengers: Endgame, all leading up to Avengers: Doomsday. You’ll be able to “relive,” and play Marvel Rivals’ take on, what happened during those times…
Loki is the center of it—we have our own version of Loki in the game, and he will be the key character that’s going link all these events together.
D23: The reaction to “Path to Doomsday” at the Marvel Rivals Assemble fan event was fantastic! What’s the game’s overall relationship to their fans?
DK: Oh, the new gaming era is all about community. We are very conscious about involving the community from the start; from the first announcement of the game. We’ve slowly built up to the largest gaming community on Discord in the world. We’re at nearly 4.3 million members as we speak!
The feedback between the developer and the community is very important, in terms of what they want to see in the game; what they love about the game; what they don’t like about the game… and the dev team is able to rapidly address those in a transparent manner, whether it’s through a video message or a quick social post addressing various feedback. And the players appreciate that they’re being heard. On top of that, it also helps that a lot of our voice talents also play the game and interact with the community. They serve as ambassadors—taking players behind the scenes when they record, or just taking them along when they play. So not only does new content start showing up that is customized to each fan’s experience, but imagine that you start playing the game and you hear the voice actor of Deadpool and he suddenly says some lines—not in the game but over their mic; over your headset—and you think, ‘Wait a minute…’ It really offers the players a lot of fun surprises.
D23: That’s incredible, and such a great way to connect with the fans… Is there anything else you’d like the readers of D23.com to know about Marvel Rivals, and about the upcoming “Path to Doomsday”?
DK: I would say, ‘Always expect the unexpected.’ Marvel Rivals is a very special game that can continue to push stories and characters that players do not expect—and they will be pleasantly surprised. This game is all about, ‘Hey, we’re going to gift you characters that are super popular and well-known, and we’re going to throw in some curveball characters that you might not expect—or even some deep cuts like Jeff the Land Shark or Luna Snow that you may not know and you might fall in love with…’ This game is able to elevate any characters that we include. And we want to make sure that even though you may not know a certain character, by playing this game, you’ll get to know them. We work very closely with Marvel Comics to service those characters for fans. Oh, and if they want to learn more, they can read about them on Marvel Unlimited!
For more info on Marvel Rivals—and to get in on the incredible player action ahead of the “Path to Doomsday”—visit MarvelRivals.com.