Filed under: Features, PC, Retro, RPGsThis is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. The Avengers' huge success in its first week of release may represent the pinnacle of the superhero takeover of mainstream culture. Superhero comics have long been comparable to video games' bigger brother, with many of the same criticisms and stereotypes and similar slow paths to respectability. There's always been a great deal of crossover between the two, especially in terms of games based on comics. Most of these were platformers or brawlers, and most, like licensed games generally, were mediocre at best, with a few exceptions.

Roleplaying games especially seemed to be a natural fit for superhero games - both usually have origin stories, over-the-top villainy, straightforward morality, and most importantly, characters overcoming adversity by gaining more strength and greater power, with single characters or small party dynamics. There were a few attempts of varying success, like the simple RPG/adventure hybrid Superhero League Of Hoboken, but it still took until 2002 for a great superhero RPG to be released: Freedom Force.