Shortly after Tribute Games and Dotemu released TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge back in 2022, attention turned to what the dev/publisher duo would work on next. Tribute teased that other licensees had come a-knocking with proposals, but what franchise do you turn to if you want to 1-up the Turtles?
The answer, it seems, is Marvel. We got our first glimpse of Marvel Cosmic Invasion back in the March 2025 Nintendo Direct, and it looked awesome. The old-school beat ’em up looked just as slick as its half-shelled predecessor, and a massive lineup of 15 playable characters at launch promised even more combo-kicking thrills.
Just about every trailer since has got comic book nerds like this writer (hello, True Believers!) pumped up and ready to go. And so, keen to hear more about the game ahead of its launch on Switches 1 and 2 on 1st December, we sat down with narrative designer Yannick Belzil and game director Fred Gemus to talk all things superheroes.
The list of topics covered would put even the Avengers: Doomsday cast list to shame, ranging from initial discussions with Marvel to plans for DLC (by way of some Maximum Carnage love). So, sit back and prepare yourselves. To quote a certain Galactic Federation Trooper, “it’s about to get real nerdy in here”…
Nintendo Life (Jim Norman): You previously mentioned that Tribute had been approached with some offers for which franchise to tackle after Shredder’s Revenge. How did the discussions with Marvel come about, and how did you settle on Cosmic Invasion?
Fred Gemus (director): Right after TMNT, we were trying to figure out what would be the best universe to tackle. We had such a great time working on an amazing brand that we love, so we wanted to do something that we really loved and that we’re big fans of.
Yannick and I are big Marvel fans, so we started to reach out to Marvel and see what their interest was at the time. Dotemu started to do the same thing on their side as well. We talked to each other and decided we should collaborate again because we had a great time on TMNT. We’re both fans of old-school games, but also the licenses that took care of them. Sometimes licenses are seen as an easy cashout, especially in the retro days; they were basically just products. But if you put a lot of love and real passion into it, it really becomes a great game, and everybody wins from that! So yeah, it was definitely the top of the list.
Yannick Belzil (narrative designer): As you can see from our current output and what has been announced for us, as long as it’s a North American comic, I’m really happy that we get to do it! [laughs]
We were really lucky that we got to do the Turtles, and that it turned out to be a lot of fun and a success. As I understand it, other people knocked on our door with their licenses. Some of that stuff is above my pay grade. I know that it did happen, but I don’t know every single one of them. But what was really important for us was that we work on one that we’re really passionate about, because we’re in the position to do that, so we should take advantage of that position.
We tried to knock at Marvel’s door really early on, at the same time that Dotemu was trying as well. Eventually, we were told, “Okay, well, maybe this could happen, but we need 15 playable characters at launch.” To which we went, “Oh, woah!” But then we decided to go for it.
You’ve obviously looked to Annihilation for your story inspiration, and your characters very much have a comic book aesthetic, too — shoutout to Nova’s mullet ponytail! What other comic books were you looking at for character design inspiration?
Yannick: Well, that’s the first thing I said to Marvel Games President Bill Rosemann when we had our first meeting! Through Zoom, I almost ran up to him and said, “Can Nova have his ponytail? Are we allowed to do that?” And he said yes, and we did, and I was really happy.
There was an iconic vibe that I wanted us to have for the characters
As for which comics we looked at, we looked at a bunch of stuff. A bit of what I do as a narrative designer, on top of writing the story, is I gather a lot of the references from the comics — that I copiously read and enjoy — for the artists, so they have a bunch of options in front of them, and then they can choose whatever works best. We decided to base things on comics early on because that’s what we love, and it’s the actual source material for these characters.
I would get a lot of examples from the ’80s and ’90s and some more modern artists as well. So, Jim Lee, John Byrne, and sometimes Jack Kirby. The way these artists have adapted these characters, I feel like there’s something dynamic about them, but they’re also really clean. It’s a version that felt like it could make the jump to pixel art in a very clean way.
The reason we take our inspiration from them is because they are more pixel-friendly. All of the MCU costumes are cool, but they’re filled with panels and lines and details, and that’s the kind of stuff that does not make the trip to pixel land as nicely.
Again with Nova, his modern costume is different since Annihilation — it’s more militaristic and badass, and it’s really cool — but to me, ’70s or ’90s Nova looks more like a classic superhero, the versions of characters you see on t-shirts. There was an iconic vibe that I wanted us to have for the characters.
Fred: Yeah, the ’90s aesthetic was important to us as well because we shine the most when we can get that bit of nostalgia in the games we make. The Annihilation storyline was something that Marvel brought to us when we started to discuss the game. They were like, “There’s one amazing storyline that was never adapted anywhere, and would be great for a video game like this, and it’s Annihilation.”
This is a hardcore space crossover that occurred pretty much at the same time as Civil War, which completely changed the cosmic universe of Marvel. Marvel was like, “There’s a bunch of bugs, and Annihilus can have all these weird goons, and it could be quite fun,” and we agreed with that, but it’s kind of a dark storyline at the same time. Annihilus just wants to destroy and kill everything, and a bunch of people die in there.
Yannick and I discussed, and we thought about what would happen if Annihilus struck the ’90s era of the Marvel universe, when the cartoons were strong, and the classic video games [were around]. And that’s pretty much how we kicked things off. We pitched that idea to Marvel, and they were like, “That’s perfect, that’s great.” Now we can have Earth heroes, we can have classic stuff, and we didn’t have to stick closely to the storyline to adapt it, but just use it as an inspiration. [It’s] basically what they do with every Marvel property: they don’t try to redo something exactly like it is, but you get the big idea, and then you have fun and create something unique from there.
You’ve spoken about the desire to introduce new characters to some players. How did you manage to settle on these lesser-known heroes?
Yannick: A lot of politics! [laughs] I am not a sports guy at all, but when you hear about trading between teams, how they pick draft picks and such, I think it was not unlike that.
I always say that a good superhero team lineup has a bunch of recognisable faces, but there are also people you know less or original characters in the background. That’s where you get some juice, character-wise, and you create interest. Sometimes you’ll buy a box of Marvel macaroni, and it’s all known characters, but they’re not really related to each other, and it doesn’t feel right. That’s not a team I recognise, it’s just a bunch of characters. But if you put lesser-known characters in there, then it’s more compelling. Basically, I’m arguing that more food products should have Beta Ray Bill on them!
There was a part of us that wanted to be surprised as well
From an ego point of view, a lot of these characters have been so well rendered in other games that we wanted to pick some characters and make them our own a bit. And so, if the game is popular and if people like these characters, whenever Phyla-Vell shows up in a future game, they will go, “Oh yeah, Phyla-Vell comes from Cosmic Invasion, that’s where her moveset was pioneered.”
Fred: On the gameplay side, that was basically our job, being able to define how these characters play. You expect Spider-Man to use webbing, but not many people know about Phyla-Vell. Nova has been in two fighting games, but never really featured in a fully fleshed game like this.
There was a part of us that wanted to be surprised as well. As Marvel fans ourselves, getting these out-of-the-box characters was great. It was fun for us as fans to get these suggestions from Marvel, but at the same time, we really wanted to make sure that it would make sense gameplay-wise, because the characters were the core part of the game.
In our previous game, we did many different characters that felt different, but they all felt kind of the same, in a way, because they all had similar abilities. We really wanted to make sure the Marvel characters would be exactly how you would expect them to be, like Captain America would use his shield, Iron Man would use repulsors and fly. So it introduced a lot of new gameplay elements as well. We really wanted to make sure that whenever we added somebody to the roster, it would bring a bit more to it.
Is there anything else that you learnt from Shredder’s Revenge going into this one?
Fred: We learned a lot about how to make beat ’em up games, for sure, like the pacing, the best way to approach level design and production, but honestly, the game was approached in such a different way to Shredder’s Revenge that we couldn’t replicate what we did.
This time around, the characters themselves were driving the production. For example, we had characters that could fly, so we wanted to make sure that they could fly in-game as well. This created these dual-layer arenas, where we needed enemies that would fly or use both lanes. We also have superheroes that use ranged abilities like projectiles, energy blasts, and such, so you need to have more ranged enemies, but also ways for enemies to react to that. So we introduced more blocking in the game, with enemies able to reposition themselves based on that.
All of these changes that were coming from the characters themselves really drove a completely different game experience than what we did previously, where it was more arcade-y, almost like a shoot ’em up. We kept that philosophy of making a game that is quite active and not just a beat-’em-up game in which you have a bunch of little duels, but more like crowd control, [where you] get rid of tons of enemies at the same time. This is more of a superhero fantasy, for sure.
At the end of the day, it was a completely different game to build. We had to relearn things even though we had a game engine that was working. We knew how to build the tools to achieve what we wanted, but we couldn’t just reuse what we did on TMNT and build from it. It had to be redone.
What was it like developing for the Switch 2?
Fred: On our side, we worked mostly from a PC build, and then we ported to other consoles. We had some information about the Switch 2, but in terms of development, we worked with outside partners to work on these versions.
As gamers, we are definitely excited about the Switch 2 — a console that fixes all the little shortcomings from the first console.
there are some aesthetics that you need to share with the older games
Yannick: When we went to Summer Games Fest this summer, as soon as we got out of the plane, Fred, our boss JF [Jean-Francois Major], and our producer Ray [Rémi Lavoie] were on the quest to find the nearest Target store and buy a Switch 2. There was not even the time to drop the suitcases at the hotel, it was, immediately, “Where can we go? How can we get the Switch 2 as fast as possible, please?”
Fred: [laughs] Yeah, because we were flying in on the launch day. Even though we ordered one online and it was coming our way, we were like, “No, we’re here for like five days, we need it.”
Much like Shredder’s Revenge, there’s a lot of ’90s beat-’em-up DNA in this, from both the arcade and the Super Nintendo. Do you have any favourites from that era that you have fond memories of playing?
Yannick: I remember playing Maximum Carnage. I wouldn’t say, “Oh man, you’re sleeping on Maximum Carnage, it’s an unheralded classic of the form,” but it does capture a comic book essence where you feel like you’ve slid into the pages of a Marvel comic, and that’s something that I wanted to recreate.
In that game, a lot of what is added to the world comes from the assists of other heroes that come in just for a moment. It made the world feel bigger, and the sprites were pretty big as well, so that was nice. When you play a superhero game, and the sprites are real small, something inside you shrinks down — they don’t feel big, you don’t feel powerful, and you’re not being given the fantasy that you want out of these characters. So Maximum Carnage was pretty good about that.
Fred: There were a lot of games that we definitely enjoyed, but we didn’t take any straight inspiration. TMNT was pretty much a spiritual sequel, it was really inspired by the older games, but, as I mentioned, we tried to really focus on characters this time. But still, there are some aesthetics that you need to share with the older games.
I personally love Captain America and The Avengers. The arcade version is great and consoles… it’s really on and off, depending on which version you pick! But this is a game that really tried to do something like we did, where basically every character would have their own abilities, [and] it’s one of the first beat ’em ups that has some range attacks in it. They really tried to stick to the source material, even though the execution is a bit all over the place, but there are a bunch of cheesy one-liners in there that I love.
There are so many Marvel games! At one point, we wanted to have this Silver Surfer throwback: when he comes in, this crazy song would start playing, just like in Silver Surfer on the NES with its amazing soundtrack from Tim Follin, but it was a bit too much.
I love The Punisher beat ’em up as well. I’m glad they brought it back for the Marvel vs. Capcom Collection, because I think it’s a fun game. In the first discussions we had, Yannick and I wanted to have the Punisher and Ghost Rider, and Marvel was like, “Why don’t you take Cosmic Ghost Rider? It’s a mix of both characters into one?” That’s genius!
I didn’t think about Marvel vs Capcom at all
But in general, the arcade beat ’em ups were always great, but then in the later stages of the 16-bit era, I think the genre got a bit more console-ised. Yannick mentioned Maximum Carnage and even Separation Anxiety, the sort of sequel that they did, were more aimed toward console play, and this is where you get the more fleshed-out ideas.
There was also an arcade fighting game that pretty much everybody forgot about in the ’90s…
Yannick: It’s Avengers Operation Galactic Storm. It sort of exists in a weird continuum, I guess, with Killer Instinct. It’s the only game where you can play or fight Shatterax, which is one of those Captain Marvel deep cuts. It’s a pretty idiosyncratic-looking game, that’s the most charitable way of talking about it.
Fred: It’s a real clunky fighting game that we found out about and played because they had some space characters as well, and we were interested in that. But yeah, it’s not a legendary game.
Sometimes we get the comparison with the MvC [Marvel vs. Capcom] games because of the Cosmic Swap, but actually, the way we came up with it was quite different from what people expect. When we started to talk about having 15 playable characters, we were at first excited, but then we started to think that if we do wildly different characters, maybe players will end up feeling like they need to pick the right character. And that’s something that we were worried about; there’s no right character. You can beat the game with any superhero you pick, but for the players, when you first see the whole roster, it’s a bit overwhelming.
So we thought that if you pick two characters, it means you get a taste of more play styles and different tool sets. The basic combination we often see is people taking a flying character and a ground character, or a ranged character and a melee-focused character. We thought it was quite interesting because you can merge two characters into one. But then we pushed it a bit further, trying to implement a way that it would extend combos or create cool scenarios where if your teammate gets caught, you can basically free him by tagging in and punching the attacker.
Yannick: I didn’t think about Marvel vs Capcom at all. I was like, “Oh yeah, the Quantum Bands like the original Captain Marvel did!” It’s a great idea, and it has a justification in canon. As we were thinking about that, the first trailers for The Marvels were coming out. It was very nice of them to pre-announce our main game mechanic in their big movie!
Were there any challenges in transforming these very specific lore technicalities, like the Cosmic Swap, into game form?
Yannick: Right off the bat, we figured out what all the characters can and can’t do based on canon. Because if you read the sole title of a comic book of any superhero, eventually they can do every possible thing because they’re the leads of their own book. That’s why the X-Men are really compelling as video game characters, because they have clear powers and limitations.
As we were choosing the characters, we sat down and said, “Okay, these characters can do this, this, and that, these characters can do this, this, and that,” for it to be more manageable and make everyone more playable.
All the Marvel games have this narrative quality to them
Fred: Yeah, we tried to create larger teams of superpowers to make sure that we had, you know, a brawler, a grabbing/throwing character, a range attack character, a flying character, an elemental character, etc. At one point, we even had icons explaining who the characters are and what they’re able to do. But we felt that these characters are well-known, people will know what to expect from them, and we shouldn’t try to be too strict about how we build them. I think it’s better to overpower them and balance them afterwards, and make sure that everyone has something recognisable and fun.
In terms of lore, we really had more of a toy box approach with TMNT. We had the same approach with Marvel, in a sense, but because we had a bigger storyline, it was just a bigger toy box in the end!
The only thing that was different this time around was that in our previous game, when it came time to record the voice-overs, Dotemu brought up the idea of picking up the original actors to do their voice work. We were like, “Oh s**t, that’s a great idea! Why didn’t we think of that before?” So, on day one, Yannick and I decided that we needed to get actors from the cartoons to come and do voice-overs this time around.
All the Marvel games have this narrative quality to them. I believe that people expect the same kind of quality from us that they would get from Ultimate Alliance 3 or from a Spider-Man game. So, we really wanted more dialogue and character exchanges in the game.
One thing that Yannick and I did at one point was make sure that whenever we swapped between characters, they would have one-liners that would match themselves, so they would feel like an actual team. That was a good week of writing! [laughs]
Yannick: It was more like two weeks! We were starting to record in a couple of weeks, so I really hunkered down and wrote. Because if you have only one swap line, you get tired of it. If you have two, it feels cheap. But three felt just right. So suddenly, all 15 characters needed three lines to say to the other characters as they swap. Fred helped me out a lot with that. He wrote a first draft for a bunch of them, and a lot of them were really good, so I kept them. But then it was like making sure that everyone says something different that feels like how their character would talk, but that doesn’t repeat what someone else would say. That was a challenging couple of weeks to make sure they all work together, but now it sounds great.
The cool thing about that is, I forgot a lot of them! So, I’m playing, and I’m thinking, “This sounds pretty good.” There are hundreds of them, all performed by these wonderful actors we got for the game, and, of course, that made it sound even better.
Shredder’s Revenge eventually landed DLC with additional characters. Do you plan to do something similar for Cosmic Invasion, or was the stress of these 15 just too much?
Yannick: We need to wait and see if the game is a success to create more of it. But people have been asking and pitching DLC to us from the comments section ever since the game was announced, so there’s no shortage of characters that we could add if we decide to do that. It’s pretty exciting that people already want more, even back when they hadn’t played the game! So, if there’s demand for it, I think it’d be a cool thing to do.
Fred: There are so many years’ worth of amazing superheroes to pick and choose from. I feel like we could be doing that for the rest of our lives, and we would still end up missing out on some. But it’s exciting to see people getting excited for the game.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Thanks to Yannick and Fred for taking the time to talk to us, and to Thomas from Tinsley PR for setting up the discussion! Marvel Cosmic Invasion launched digitally on Switch and Switch 2 on 1st December 2025 for £26.99 / $29.99, with a physical edition arriving on 13th March 2026.
