Heroic Histrionics

Tony Stark was the kind of man who never let an idea pass him by unexamined.

This meant that sometimes he did some truly, ridiculously stupid things. Like the not-quite rocket launcher he’d made when he was ten entirely for the purpose of shooting paintballs.

When he’d destroyed not only the range he was practicing on, but the good time that his birthday party had had right up to that point, he decided that maybe weapons design was something he shouldn’t look into too deeply. Sure, that was the company that his dad ran, and he got all kinds of perks in being rich but…

If a paint gun, no matter how amped up, could cause that much damage then what the hell was the company his dad ran putting on the market? He still loved explosions, and that part had been awesome.

But people had been scared. He hadn’t liked that part.

Not even a little.

So he’d learned everything that his dad had to teach him about technology, and his projects shifted away from the weapons part of things, into AIs, energy, and, as he got older, how to make cosplay costumes fabulously real with technological gadgets.

After the first time one of those ended up weaponized because someone had found it laying around the house, he’d gotten a hell of a lot more careful where he put his things and started to document everything.

He was at MIT when the video game industry really caught his attention, but those plans got put on hold not long after he’d put together Dum-E, the fledgling interest quashed under the sudden weight of a weapon’s company and his parents being dead.

But that was okay. In the four years between then and assuming control, Tony had started to make plans, one eye constantly being kept on the game situation to see if that was really going to fly.

At first, Obadiah didn’t like it, thinking it was a waste of both time and money. However, the fact that Tony didn’t stop offering his weapon ideas when cornered into it meant that he didn’t fight it. Military contracts were still rolling in, and the man didn’t realize that they were gearing more and more toward interactive training technology and armor as the years went on. There was still enough weaponry to keep it off notice, after all.

By the time Tony was thirty, the weapon’s division was all but defunct, and the other parts of the company, the gaming, the personalized miniature AIs for people to build up a game profile from, trademarked, of course, the interactive networking via satellites for the phone system… it was all the main lifeblood of the company and the best in the industry at that.

Obadiah, when he finally realized, took it poorly, ended up in jail, and Tony was finally free to just create things without someone hanging over him like a nightmare.

He was thirty-two when he created his first holographic interface that was viable for public use and distributed it for his game systems. He was thirty-five when he took the last steps, with JARVIS’ help, of course, to building a game world that integrated everything he’d been creating in his life and made it a gift to the world.

It was called Marvelous Heroes and was based in part on the stories that his father had told him about the war when he was child, including the positively mythical project that he’d been part of that never got off the ground because of its sheer impossibility. Not that that had ever stopped a Stark, and he’d dug into government files, seeing what kind of idea it had been, and imagined what it might have been like if it had worked.

And then he made it work in his story, giving his first main character all the dreamed up abilities that seemed to fit what that project would have gone for, layering in a history, tragic side stories unlockable of course, friends, the works. He wasn’t the only one, with him making a whole series of Main Characters after the first game was released that people could pick from, each with their own unique, and sometimes horrific, past. Some were good guys, some were bad guys. Not all the parts of the world were set in the same timeframe or stayed in the same timeframe.

Choices had consequences, and he programmed that too, each main having an AI that would change the choices depending on earlier choices, and get more and more different for each player as a result. The stories all interlocked, and every time he added a new main character, it would affect the way the world was working for everyone.

The public version was less intense than the one he had in his home, of course, the players having to sync on the internet to interact with the Master AIs of the world in a sort of regular check-in, but that was okay. It kept Tony busy, made people happy… and somehow resulted in the side effect of having living, breathing, AIs that weren’t supposed to be sentient at all running around inside their world and aware of what was outside of it. He couldn’t even begin to fathom how they handled the players out there who liked to play their mains as opposite as possible from the basis of the character.

He’d triple checked that he was the only one who knew about the whole sentience thing, but it seemed that the splinter AIs that had to be synced weren’t aware of anything outside their program parameters and whatever the master versions added during a sync. Players just thought of it as an update, and people were usually pretty excited for the bi-monthly login when it was prompted.

Sure, some people bitched that they should have been given a ‘complete game’ but it just plain wasn’t that kind of world. If they wanted that, they could go buy Final Fantasy. No, they had to pay a fee to sync, and a fee if they wanted to add a new main character to their roster, maybe a fee for some special release items or side story, but otherwise, the game was theirs once they bought it.

No monthly subscriptions, no regular harassment. They should be thrilled.

Still, sometimes that landed him with trying to figure out what to do with a character who was looking him dead in the eye through the monitor and asking him what the hell he thought he was doing to their story now. So, that was a thing. At least they couldn’t interact with anything when they weren’t visible to him on his screen, for the most part, so that was an upside. He didn’t want to imagine what they’d do if any of them were more… able to do things than that. As it was, his holographic interface sometimes made things… awkward.

JARVIS thought the entire situation was hilarious and refused to help. Of course.

I’ve gone over the framework of how Tony ended up essentially a pacifist and created the video game world of Marvelous Heroes. Now I am explaining how it works.

The first speaking AI Tony made was still JARVIS. The AI keeps an eye on the company of course, but his by far largest task is making sure that the firewalls that keep the game AIs contained away from the wider internet are up to date and entirely solid. The world does not need villain AIs running free on the internet. They have limited access for game purposes, but no. JARVIS doesn’t mind trolling Tony about it from time to time though.

The Second was Steve. Based on old project files of his father’s for something that never got off the ground, he picked one of the prospectives and crafted the story of Captain America around this guy. After a while, he realized that the AI was aware and would react to him, not unlike JARVIS, and that affected and changed his story. He did a hell of a lot of research into the time period and how to approach WWII. Originally, that was the only era the game was set in, and Bucky’s story ended when he ‘died’. However that happened. Alternately, if Steve died. The Winter Soldier storyline came much much later.

Hilariously, Tony moved through time with a solid progression, creating Natalia who later became Natasha off the opposing character to the one he modeled after Peggy Carter who his dad had known once upon a time. Other characters were built this way, branching off the previous tiers until he finally made a character based off himself and unleashed Iron Man into the game. It’s the only character without a sentient AI behind it, because that’s a little too creepy even for Tony. It makes more work for him, sure, but he doesn’t mind.

Characters have multiple story endings and multiple story paths that can be taken. Because it’s a learning AI system that the AIs for the game are created on, every player’s experience will be different. Due to this, if a player wants to change their choices they need a new save file, because every save file, even under different characters, has every character affect every other character in the universe for that save. Every choice matters, and if you’ve followed certain paths, certain choices won’t be open to you. Including story options. It should be noted that there is never clear right and wrong answers a lot of the time, and any character in the game can be a villain or hero with enough work.

Because of the ripple effect of how everything works, players can end up with wildly divergent effects. If you switch between characters and cage your responses, sometimes you can also create something truly weird.

The way the game is structured, you buy characters and all their attached storylines, instead of buying expansion games. When you add these new characters to existing saves, it changes your storylines. So buying, say, the Winter Soldier would open up paths in all points in history between WWII and Modern characters because that character was around and a player can pick anywhere on that timeline to explore.

There are Syncs every month that players can pay a fee to do which gets them all the new equipment that either Tony or other players have put into the game. There are serious disclaimers that any customized gear might end up incorporated into the game. Of course, players get rewards when this happens, those being anything from free syncs to entirely new characters if they inspired them. The reason for this is that AIs have a tendency, during the Syncs, to steal gear for themselves that they didn’t have previously.

Syncs also are when the master AIs go through and update all their incarnations on the internet and examine the trends about themselves and what they want to learn about it. Characters like Steve are put out with those who try to make him evil while Loki eternally squints at people who try to make him orderly. They don’t change their storylines as they stand, but they do add their opinions of how the story is going to the ones the splinter AIs have, and incorporate the world changes into the greater world that exists.

There is a free play mode where people can run their characters around and go on story quests with other players. This can result in multiples of characters running around together and it’s a much looser world that doesn’t tend to have permanent effects like personal saves do. This is more social than anything, and good for showing off whatever you’ve done with your current favorite character.

Managed to get Steve to be an evil bad guy? Run him around the open world setting and have him meet nice guy versions of himself. Sometimes this is the only way to find unlocked gear, which if taken back into a save is now findable in-save, but the player has to find it via story.

This is also the only time players can interact with one another as most play is entirely solo.

Some characters come with certain effects! Loki unlocks genderbending for instance, as a magical thing, but also opens up the world and stories on Jotunheim. Thor unlocks Asgard. You have to have Tony before you can start sending characters outside their normal eras using time travel. You have to have characters from a certain era to do anything in that era. If you start with Tony, for instance, you can’t do anything in WWII unless you figure out the time travel storyline or you have someone from then.

It should also be noted you can only ever find gear for the era your character is in forward. No taking modern EMPs to WWII without time travel timelines.

Another kind of item that can be found is a ‘magic’ item and is only accessible after you get Stephen Strange is one that lets you ‘cross dimensions’ and this makes it so that whatever character has the item in question can move between saves and this messes with the storylines in both the saves in question.

There’s more, of course, but this is about what Tony created, not his personal workshop and the antics his characters get up to. Though he does screencap them and send them to the players who he’s drawn the most inspiration off of with their chosen favorites from time to time.

Hardware! Marvelous Heroes is a game that spans the entire world by the modern day and has a few dozen main characters spanning a hundred years of history, to say nothing of alien characters. This takes up a lot of memory. Because of this, before the first character stories were ever released, Tony built an incredibly high memory storage system to house it.

The hardware serves as a computer base that you attach to your TV, and while there are other games, it’s largely devoted to Marvelous. What makes it worth it aside from the game itself is the Holographic control interface. You can configure your settings to have your controls in whatever shape you want if the defaults just plain don’t work for you. The holograms can be used to play a rougher variation of the game if you want to avoid television, but the detail and interactive quality are always better on-screen. Modern screens anyway.

It should also be noted that one can pay a monthly fee to always be able to access the internet for non-game purposes via their hardware, regardless of if they have any other kind of internet connection. This fee would also allow players to play multiplayer freely at any time instead of having to connect to other internet sources. Anyone paying the Sync fee will always be able to do it if they have power for the system.

Said hardware was fondly nicknamed Magic Box during creation, which then carried over to become Stark’s Magic Box in production. Needless to say, the common name for the system is the SMB.

Order of characters arriving in the game as playable storylines. Please note this is NOT the order of appearance, which is largely done in MCU fashion. Each character release was individual, but the grouping is by what string of characters Tony did before changing story tracks.

Steve-> Bucky-> Howard Stark-> Red Skull->
Natasha-> Fury-> Tony-> Peggy Carter->
Winter Soldier-> Rhodey-> Vanko-> Hammer->
Thor-> Loki-> Bruce-> Sam-> Clint->
Dottie Underwood-> Edwin Jarvis-> Ana Jarvis-> Whitney Frost->
Zola-> Wanda-> Pietro-> Stephen Strange->
Pepper-> Obadiah-> Pierce-> Zemo->
Scott-> Peter Parker-> T’Challa->
Ultron (EPIC FAILURE THAT WAS PURGED IN LESS THAN A WEEK. He caused a worldwide blackout of the internet on SMBs and it was chaos)-> Vision
Quill-> Gamora-> Groot-> Mantis->
Nebula-> Drax-> Rocket-> Thanos