Marvel’s Guardian of the Galaxy game was very much one of 2021’s surprise hits. Eidos-Montréal’s rendition of the hit franchise successfully managed to put its own twist on Star-Lord and his motley crew of vagabonds. However, as a recent interview with Edge reveals art director Bruno Gauthier-Leblanc’s initial plans for how he wanted the Guardians to look “scared the hell out of” Marvel.
“The way I like to work is to turn the dial up to 12 on the concepts”, Gauthier-Leblanc says, “and then bring it back, instead of going ‘one, two, three, four’.” According to the developer, this led to some rather striking concepts for the gamified Guardians, which included a “scary” Groot, a cosmonaut-clad Star-Lord, a human-sized Rocket, and a portly Drax.
While these first-impressions didn’t go over particularly well with Marvel, it didn’t take long for a happy compromise to be found, especially when it came to picking out alternate costumes. Gauthier-Leblanc says Marvel was “almost fanboying” and pitching various attires from numerous comic editions. However, there was still one more Guardian to materialise: Gamora.
“For the longest time, we were struggling to really understand Gamora”, says narrative lead Mary DeMarle. As perhaps the most complicated character among the Guardians, the studio had to be meticulous in how it approached her story. “She’s the one [character] who has a lot of different versions”, Gauthier-Leblanc notes, making her just as difficult to design visually as she was narratively.
How teamwork (and a handful of '80s hits) brought Eidos Montreal's MCU-beating misfits to life in Marvel's Guardians Of The Galaxy. E374 is on sale now: https://t.co/BCwLOqZYGZ pic.twitter.com/LkpoN1B18U
— Edge (@edgeonline) July 20, 2022
Fortunately, as DeMarle notes, Gamora’s voice actor – Kimberly-Sue Murray – played a pivotal role in shaping Gamora, and so the not-so-fantastic five was formed.
Though it seems that Gamora remained somewhat normal from an initial design point of view, it would’ve been hilarious to see a six-foot-tall Rocket scurrying around, or squaring up to Quill when they had yet another dispute over the ship.
Meanwhile, the prospect of Groot being embodied as some sort of eldritch horror, and fighting alongside a XXXXL Drax is something we never thought we’d want to see, but by J’son we hope the early concepts come to light some day.
You can check out edition 374 of Edge right here.