Entertainment

Marvel Teaser Has Fans Wondering How It Could Cross Over With 'Fallout'

This could be big.

Marvel Studios / Bethesda

Marvel’s up to something mysterious, and it might just have something to do with the Fallout video game series created by developer Bethesda.

On Wednesday, Marvel Entertainment released a cryptic teaser across all its social media accounts that features a design uncannily similar to that of the iconic loading screen from Bethesda’s Fallout video game series. But instead of four generic shapes that remind us of the titular nuclear fallout, the image has the symbols for four Marvel characters: Spider-Man, Captain America, Black Panther, and Captain Marvel.

This could be crossover event between Fallout and Marvel, or simply a Marvel storyline inspired by Fallout, or maybe Marvel just got the rights to create official comics based on the Fallout universe. Admittedly, the possibilities are endless and we know almost nothing, but it has a lot of people very interested regardless.

Here’s the teaser image on Twitter that emerged on Wednesday:

Perhaps the most ambitious and interesting theory is that we’re on the verge of hearing that Bethesda is making a Marvel game. Even weirder? It wouldn’t be the first time that someone’s thought we’d get a Bethesda Marvel game.

Bethesda actually has a newly-minted branch in Austin, Texas that was rebranded from BattleCry Studios to a Bethesda Game Studios office earlier this month. The group was originally formed in formed in 2012 to create a game similar to Overwatch called BattleCry, but that game was ultimately canceled and the team worked on Doom instead. Since the merger, the old BattleCry site has since been absorbed by Bethesda’s. But in March 2017, a user on the NeoGAF forums noticed a photo of a BattleCry Studios team member’s desk on BattleCryStudios.com.

That desk was littered with Marvel figures, and two of them were Black Panther and Captain Marvel. Coincidence? Maybe. But maybe not. What if this is an Overwatch clone similar to the original BattleCry but full of Marvel characters instead?

'Overwatch' pits tons of different characters in team-based combat. Can you imagine a roster of Marvel characters doing the same?

Blizzard Entertainment

It’s a farfetched notion to think this slight evidence means the team has been working on a Marvel game in secret for a while now, but it could also explain why the office was rebranded so recently. They might be gearing up for this. Bethesda’s notorious for taking several years to develop its widely beloved games, and they’re long overdue for something that’s not simply a VR version of Fallout 4 or Skyrim.

To be fair, here’s the harsh reality of what we can probably expect:

The cryptic message comes with the #MarvelComics tag, so this whole thing probably does have something to do with Marvel’s comics division. Is Marvel simple co-opting Fallout imagery because these four characters are coming together in a nuclear apocalypse?

Whatever it is, lots of people are excited:

Whether this is Marvel- or Fallout-based, it’s bound to be cool:

The official Fallout Twitter account even weighed in, referencing the fake superhero from the video game universe called Vault Boy:

No matter what it is, Marvel is primed to release the news on Thursday, March 29 at 12 pm noon.

Stay tuned for more info tomorrow.