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With the recent launch of the First Look trailer for the Marvel Realm of Champions mobile game, I dug into my archives and dusted off a previously unpublished interview from NYCC 2019. I had sat down with Kabam Creative Director Gabriel Frizerra and Producer Meghann McGregor to discuss the upcoming project right on the convention floor, surrounded by what seemed to be hundreds of faithful fans of the company’s mobile juggernaut Marvel’s Contest of Champions. Lines for Kabam’s CoC NYCC tournament wrapped about the massive themed exhibition, in a crowded hall already packed shoulder to shoulder. 

That experience seems a million miles away considering the profound impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, including recent confirmation that NYCC will be part of Reedpop’s virtual Metaverse initiative this year. It felt good to look back, if only a few months, to what feels like a completely different time. Below is a candid, informal conversation about the development of Realm of Champions and how working on it and Contest of Champions has allowed developer Kabam to build a strong relationship with Marvel as stewards of the iconic brand. Some questions and responses have been edited for clarity.   

ComicAttack: If you guys would be kind enough to identify yourselves and your roles in the development of the game?

Gabriel Frizerra: My name is Gabriel Frizerra and I’m Creative Director for both Contest of Champions and the new game, Realm of Champions.

Meghann McGregor: My name is Meghann McGregor and I’m the producer on Marvel’s Realm of Champions.

CA: So what really determined the decision to make the transition to an action RPG from the  highly successful Contest of Champions and how much will you be supporting the previous title with the new one coming out.

GF: Well Contest is one of the biggest games in the world and it keeps growing. We’re not going to let that game go.

MM: Not at all.

GF: It pays the bills and we love it. I still work on it every day and it keeps getting bigger. It’s a completely different experience. We’re big Marvel geeks and we like to tell stories above all. We had this idea for a story and we wanted to put it in Contest, but then it kind of became too big, too crazy, too out there, and I was like, “Maybe we should make another game.” We went to Marvel and pitched it and they loved it, so now we have two games. We started with an entire new team, the Contest team is still there and it keeps growing too. So we have two teams, separate but the story is connected. It’s the same universe.

CA: And what kind of development challenges presented themselves going in a different direction and going into a different genre with the new game?

MM: Well you know, for us the game was very different. Usually in games you start with the game mechanics, but this time we started with the story. So we were like, “Okay, what would be best to do to serve the story” when it comes to the gameplay in this game. So you know, that in itself was a challenge, but a challenge we wanted to take on because we do care about Marvel and the stories that we tell.

And then also doing multiplayer, that’s something very new for us. But it’s been a great challenge. It’s working out quite well. We’ve had lots of internal playtests amongst hundreds of people that have worked really well. But that has been a really interesting challenge that we’re really excited to take on.

CA: In terms of platform and dealing with mobile, has there been consideration of shifting to PC or console?

MM: Yes.

GF: We always talk about that, but we are a mobile-first company and mobile has it all. It has the audience, you know there’s more than 2 billion phones out there. It has the critical mass of people, especially in multiplayer games. We need a lot of people to get in so when you play it you don’t get hanging in matchmaking and stuff like that. So we need a lot of people. And we always do free to play games, we don’t do paid games.

CA: So having access to that immediate installed base is massively effective?

MM: Yeah. The games reach millions of people. Everyone has a phone, but not everyone has a console. And we really say, always, it’s a console in your pocket. So yeah, it’s kind of just a given that we would make a game like this.

FB: We like this netplay experience. Contest, for example, the fighting game that we have, it’s like you can immediately pick up and play it so easy. But then to master it those guys, all those guys on line here, have been playing for years. And they come back for the tournament. Those guys made it into a science, you know. The timing of the attacks, the evades, and all the RPG elements that are getting deeper and deeper as you progress.

So it’s not like old time mobile games, that it’s just like a casual experience and that’s it right? Those people are hardcore, and now that it’s becoming more hardcore, we want to make a game thinking of them. You know it’s still the “casual” experience, but as you start playing you get involved and it’s, “Okay, I really need to be good at this to actually set up properly.”

CA: Now I have to ask both of you, is it important for you to kind of overcome that stigma that a lot of harcore gamers have that mobile isn’t real gaming?

GF: It used to be more important to me but now you know, we have a community.

MM: Yeah.

GF: And those guys are gamers, there’s no other way to say it.

CA: Yeah, you have the love.

MM: I think when you hear hardcore gamer people just- You think like hardcore MOBA thing you’re gonna play. A hardcore gamer is someone who plays a game everyday. I have discussions with people about this all the time. Friends who, say, play Candy Crush. You are a hardcore gamer if you are putting 2 hours into it. So I think we don’t really need to worry about the stigma.

GF: And yes, they’re present, but we did a panel with Marvel at the demo stage and for a while I was like, “These people (the “console people”), they only like console games. Are they gonna boo me when I present?” And I was like you know what, I’m going to show the art. The art is as good as anything out there. You know, the story, we love Marvel so much… We could have done a console game, it’s just a matter of the kind of game we do. The pipeline is exactly the same.

MM: Yep.

GF: The artists in my team, they sculpt the characters in high definition using the same tools, ZBrush…

CA: And the specifications on some of these phones now, it’s not really that much of a gap to bridge.

GF: Right.

CA: I really appreciate being able to, like I’m always an advocate for an underdog, and that’s not to say that you guys are because you’re so big.

GF: (Smiling) We used to be.

CA: But kind of bridging that, busting out of the conventions, busting out of the expectations and establishing yourselves as something this massive, that’s extraordinary.

MM: Yeah. It’s very true and I always see this similar, or a little similar, to how television and film were. You know, “You can’t make good TV anymore, but you can make good film.” Well, now it’s like television has surpassed movies in quality. So I think mobile games are going to be on the same format going forward. And they kind of already are.

GF: There will be an audience for everything. When I started the company, from the original five, we never thought differently. We’re just always like fuck, what is the- (Laughs) I knew I was going to say it.

CA: Be you man, all day.

GF: How can we make good games? We all left EA because we were on console games, and I worked at Activision and all that. And then we just started in this little room and, “How can we make the games we want to make?” And that’s exactly the same thing. This game, we’re a 500 people(sic) company right now. So 10 years later, almost. But I go to work every day and it’s the same people looking at me and it’s like, “What is the coolest thing we can make today, that will keep us interested?” 

Part of making this game, when I pitched it, it was, “Yeah, we’ve been working on Contest for a while.” Now that we have the recognition we can say to Marvel, and Marvel will hear us, on any project we talk about, because they know we know their Universe, what kind of game do we want to make? That didn’t come from business, it still comes from the creatives and that’s so fresh. That’s the job I want to work. I still feel like an underdog in some ways, but I think it’s good. It keeps me hungry. I want to prove something every day.

CA: Going back to Realm of Champions and the scope of the core gameplay, how long are we talking? Can you put an hour figure on it or is it something persistent?

MM: At this point, we’re not talking too much about gameplay. We’re keeping it under our hat for a while. But I think, again, it will be a very in-depth experience for mobile.

GF: This is the metagame. The game is about conquering Battleworld. If you read Secret Wars and know a lot about Marvel you know like, different houses of superheroes. This is an alternate reality, so they all look different but they’re still the heroes you recognize in a way. This is the metagame. The session is something that we’re playing with.

We want it to be snappy and fast and action-based. We don’t want people to have to be drawn out for long periods of time playing one session. This is one thing we know we want. We’re still testing different things. But Contest, for example, you can play for a couple of minutes, play a couple of fights and then you put it back in your pocket. Or like some of those guys play for, I don’t know, 8 hours a day.

MM: They probably do play for 8 hours a day.

GF: They do. So we like that. We like that kind of thing.

CA: But do you feel it’s limiting in any way in terms of taking the narrative where you want to go? To focus and say, “I want it consumable in these small pieces, but I still want it to be something that pulls people through continuously and that people can get engaged in and feel deeply.” Was that a struggle at all?

GF: Well, we do that in Contest all the time. Contest has a long story that we’ve been telling for 5 years, but we also have what we call the One-Shots right? So every one-shot is a contained story and our idea is that we always put on a show. Games are not, at least in mobile, console it’s getting like that too- Games are not projects anymore. They’re services, right? So people can go anywhere they want. They can delete this game tomorrow because something else came out.

So we always need to keep people interested with a show, so every month we redress the game. This is a new event, new thing, new splash screen, new story. Yeah, it’s bite sized sometimes, but we also have the story connect with the big- It’s like TV with the monster-of-the -week kind of thing. We like that, but this is kind of like that too. We want this world to be a living, breathing world.

MM: Always changing.

GF: Always changing and the stories are going to be told by the players too. We want players to rise and become big celebrities in the world if they are really good and actually influence the world. So this territory here, I know that guy is the king there, so maybe I’ll bring my friends to play against that guy. There’s a lot of things that we’re exploring right now, so the story is not only told by us. We plant the seeds and the players will go there and then plug their own personality into it.        

MM: Player created drama.

CA: How does it feel to have an entity as large as Marvel and have them come in and say that you can have the latitude to do the things that you want?

GF: Well, tell that to my 9 -year-old self and he’ll freak out. In the beginning it was earned. In the beginning they would look at us, when Contest was proposed, even before we actually pitched the game you know the business types at the time were just like, “Yeah, we’re going to make a deal with Marvel to create this game.” But the creatives of Marvel is(sic) the ones that actually drive the process. It’s a really fresh company like that. It’s not just the suits. They say, ”Cool, but who are you?” What’s your geek cred or whatever? Do you understand Marvel?

And we had never done a fighting game before, so all that stuff we had to prove. But soon after we started talking with the creatives, and I go into the room like, “I want to do this version and this version…” And it was like, “How do you know that?” So I never stopped leveling. Those guys geek out with us, every week we have a call. And after a year or two years the game starts blowing up and then they say, “Okay, those guys get it.” So right now those guys are part of the team, they’re like brothers.

MM: Yeah, they’re like our family. 

GF: And we met him here, Bill Roseman, the leader of Marvel Games, Tim Hernandez, Pete Rosas, all those guys. And just talking about that kind of thing like, “Oh, what kind of Doctor Strange?” “Oh, let’s do it!” And they all get excited. That’s the kind of problem we have right now with them. Sometimes it’s too many ideas.

CA: You get kind of that scope creep where it’s just more and more and more?

GF: And it’s like, “Oh, this is an awesome idea! But awww, it will take 6 months to make…”

MM: We’ll do it in post-launch. Again, we want this game to be living and breathing for many- A long, long time. Yeah, we launch next year, but then there will be so much more to come and so much stories to tell and just so much we can do with this game.

GF: Yeah mobile games, when they launch, it’s just the beginning right? It’s just really, we start getting heavy in conversation. See what the players want, what the players prefer, and tweak the experience. We do that every month with Contest. You know, “New event!” People hate it. Okay, we just change it. “New character!” Oh, the character’s too powerful or too weak, go and rebalance right?

CA: Is having that constant ability to in and tweak things, versus you look back 20 years ago, when the game came out, that WAS the game. That was it.

GF: Right. Yeah, yeah.

MM: Right, you shipped it on disc and that was it. Because it’s very freeing for creators, and very, I think, “partnership” with the fans and the players because you can get that feedback. “Hey, I wasn’t crazy about that…” I’m like, let’s have a meeting and talk about, “Okay, let’s build something that will make these people excited and make them come back.” So that itself is a part of it.

GF: But it’s not being completely pandering. I hate that kind of attitude sometimes that somebody is, “What do you want? You want this mixed with this? Here you go! Please, give me your money!” It’s not like that.

MM: It’s a partnership.

GF: Yeah, because the gameplay- Those guys know our game sometimes more than we do. They’re specialists. In creative terms, we really want to make this playground… It’s still our vision, we want them to be surprised and have that kind of thing, but this one is a bit more flexible.

If we see good ideas coming and good directions, let’s say everybody stops fighting in the House of Iron and it becomes really powerful and the rest of the houses start getting less powerful… Maybe there’s a plague, there’s an Extremis Plague and all the Iron Mans get debuffs or something like that. This is the kind of thing we want to do. Have people be surprised.

One of the things I’ve been talking a lot with people and it surprised me at first but now it’s interesting, is that they’re like, “I wasn’t into Marvel at all. I never even watched the movies and then I started playing the game and then I got interested and then downloaded some comics and now I read the comics.” I say that’s what we want to do. We want to make everybody a Marvel fan the way we are. So we can be in this playground together.

CA: It’s really extraordinary to have that basis, but to also offer your content as a window into something that is this expansive, and that so many people love and can connect with. Having that connection and that engagement is a powerful thing to be able to wield. I know it’s so soon with you guys developing Realm of Champions but, looking ahead, what kind of project would you want to take a crack at? What’s something you’d love to be able to do?

GF: That’s a hard one, because this is it for me.

CA: Really?

GF: This is my dream project because everything that I’ve pitched, that’s it. Because everybody has their own version of the Marvel Universe in their own head, and that’s mine. So before coming here I was like, “What if everybody hates it?” That’s so personal right? You kind of feel a bit vacant. You’re just like, “Oh my god, everybody’s gonna hate my ideas. They’re gonna hate this thing.” But that’s it.

CA: You talk to some devs and they’re like, “I had to work on this project, I had to build this clout, I had to get all of this behind me before I could do the things I want to do.” But for you to be saying, “No, this is what I always wanted to do. This is it right here.”

GF: I’ve paid my dues. I’ve worked on games I hated.

MM: Yeah and I feel that myself too. This is a dream project. I’ve loved Marvel since I was a kid and I like the weird Marvel take we’re taking to. One of my favorite comics was Marvel Zombies, and things like that where it’s a real cool reimagining. So for me, it’s just like when I work on this game it’s just like I feel like I’m not really working because this is just such a dream.

GF: It felt really earned. It felt really earned because we started with Marvel’s Contest of Champions as a one-to-one thing. You get Spider-Man, be Spider-Man. You get Hulk, you’re Hulk. And then we started stretching our wings and we decided, “Hey, what if we design a little bit here or a little bit there?” But then Marvel said, “Hey, you guys want to create your own character?” Then our own character became part of the comics.

And we created more and more, but this feels like we’re creating an entire universe, an entire alternate universe, which is a big responsibility. Because we grew up with those things, Age of Apocalypse, Earth X, Secret Wars, all this stuff. So we’re just like, “Okay, now it’s our turn to give it a shot.” And when they actually look at us, I remember Bill looking at me like, “You’re building a new universe.” And he was congratulating me because it’s not something they give to everybody. They know that we earned that from many years.

CA: That’s a massive validation for a lot of hard work and it sounds like you guys have done a tremendous job. I can’t wait to actually get a look at Realm of Champions. Thank you so much.

As always, I’d like to thank Gabriel Frizerra and Maghan McGregor for taking the time to discuss their work on and passion for this project. You can find out more about their unique dystopian take on Marvel’s comic universe through the Marvel’s Realm of Champions official site.