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Last night Sony finally re-revealed Insomniac’s highly anticipated next step in the Marvel gaming universe: trading the high-flying webslinging of their Spider-Man games for a gore-soaked soiree into the realm of Marvel’s mutants for Wolverine. While we learned that this is certainly going to be a much more gory take on the studio’s trademark action, we also learned that Wolverine will be including a few familiar faces, factions, and locales from the comics, too.
Of course you know who Logan is already—and just like Spider-Man before it, Wolverine will be remixing and reimagining comic book lore for its own unique spin on Marvel—but here’s a quick rundown of who’s who from the first trailer, and some important locations we know we’ll be visiting.
Where: Canada
Okay, this one might seem a bit obvious: most people know that Logan himself is from Canada, so it’s not too surprising that we’ll at least spend some of our time in Wolverine up in the chilly north of his homeland (a brief sign seen in the trailer points us more specifically around Squamish, in British Columbia). But what most comics readers may not be familiar with is the fact that the Canadian government has a pretty solid history in Marvel’s comics as being absolutely evil.
The Canadian government has long had branches to monitor and encourage official superhero activity, like Department H, the monitoring branch that operated the Canadian superteam Alpha Flight, but it’s also been repeatedly shown (especially during John Byrne’s legendary run on Alpha Flight) that Canada’s government is extremely corrupt and often up to no good, leading to its various heroes rebelling against the government’s machinations. There’s also the unfortunate bit that, perhaps more pertinent for Logan, where another shady department within the Canadian government, Department K, surreptitiously revived the Weapon X program after it had been shut down, conducting horrendous experimentation on subjects as it attempted to re-emulate the American government’s own plans to create the perfect supersoldier.
It was Department K that actually built on Logan’s own prior experimentation to give Wade Wilson Logan’s healing factor, turning him into Deadpool in the process (and getting their revived Weapon X program shut down). But given we know that the premise of Wolverine is going to focus on a confused Logan trying to recover his memories, it won’t be too surprising if going home doesn’t uncover some dark secrets about how he was forged into an adamantium-bonded weapon.
Who: Omega Red
Briefly seen tussling with Wolverine in the trailer, Omega Red—aka Arkady Rossovich—is another figure who has a long history with Logan, although for mostly very silly reasons. A Russian mutant serial killer, Rossovich was eventually arrested by Interpol and handed over to the KGB, who promptly tried to fashion him into Russia’s own answer to Captain America. On top of his own mutant abilities—the ability to secrete deadly pheromones known as “Death Spores” that could kill humans almost instantaneously—KGB experimentation gave Omega Red enhanced durability, strength, and reflexes.
But most importantly, he had two retractable metallic tentacles surgically implanted into his wrists. Made of carbonadium, the Russians’ attempt to create a proxy to adamantium, more malleable but also incredibly toxic. The tentacles slowly poisoned Omega, forcing him to use them in combination with his pheromone abilities to drain the life force of his victims in an attempt to sustain his strength. Told he would require a “Carbonadium Synthesizer,” a device that could remold carbonadium and stabilize the radiation poisoning it caused, Omega Red was eventually put on ice by the Russian government and deemed too dangerous to control, but he was eventually revived by Matsu’o Tsurayaba and the Hand and told to hunt down Wolverine, who allegedly knew where the synthesizer could be found, kicking off a beef Arkady would have with Logan and the X-Men on and off for decades.
However, it was actually true—while part of the Black Ops CIA-backed squad Team X, Wolverine, Maverick, and Sabretooth’s final mission on the team saw them steal the carbonadium synthesizer while recovering a CIA double agent, Janice Hollenbeck. Hollenbeck died during the mission, and Logan eventually stored the synthesizer in her coffin for a time. Omega Red has had access to the synthesizer here and there over the almost 40 years of comics he’s been around for, but regardless of it, he’ll always have a grudge against Wolverine, and that’s seemingly no different in this game.
Who: Mystique
The shapeshifting Raven Darkhölme has lived many lives over the course of over a century, and in that time she’s been everything from a mutant terrorist to a government agent to a member of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants and the Hellfire Club and has even occasionally been a member of the X-Men herself. The wife of the precognitive mutant Destiny—aka Irene Adler, whom Raven first met when she was in disguise as the investigator Sherlock Holmes, yes, really—Raven has deep, deep ties to generations of X-Men stories, both as anti-hero and villain, through her connection to her and Destiny’s son Nightcrawler and their adoptive daughter Rogue.
It’s unsurprising that Mystique is in Wolverine, given that she’s likewise brushed with Logan time and time again in the comics. What little we’ve seen of her in the trailer suggests, however, that this iteration of her may have some ties to the X-Men, given her tactical suit has a black-and-yellow color scheme similar to several iterations of X-Men uniforms over the years, and especially considering we see her battling the same cybernetic foes as Logan (more on them later).
Where: Madripoor
A fictional Southeast Asian island nation created in 1985, it’s no surprise that Madripoor will be a key location in Wolverine, given that Logan has long had ties to the area (and Asia in general, given his history with Japan). Madripoor played a major part in Logan’s 1988 solo series, which saw him largely operating away from the X-Men (who were in their “Outback Era,” having relocated to Australia after being believed to have sacrificed themselves in a battle with the being known as the Adversary) and out of costume, going by “Patch.” We see one of Logan’s favorite watering holes in Madripoor’s Lowtown, the Princess Bar, a few times in the trailer.
Modern incarnations of Madripoor have moved on from the den of piracy it was originally portrayed as—giving the island nation more of a behind-the-scenes criminal underworld element, much like the vision of Madripoor created for the MCU in Falcon and the Winter Soldier—and it appears, from the little we can see, that Wolverine‘s vision for Madripoor is no exception, right down to keeping the divide between the island’s slums in Lowtown and the more glamorous skyscrapers of Hightown.
Who: The Reavers
Logan slices up a lot—a lot—of people in this debut trailer, and while many of them are spurting gallons of blood thanks to it, some of them are spurting gallons of blood and losing swanky cybernetic limbs along the way. Thanks to the Playstation Blog, we can presume that these cyborg mercenaries are the game’s take on the Reavers.
Initially another part of the X-Men’s Outback era period—the X-Men take over the cyborg thieves’ base as their own place of operations in Australia, liberating the mutant teleporter Gateway from the Reavers’ imprisonment in the process—the Reavers were reformed into a more prominent foe of the X-Men under Donald Pierce after he was ousted from the inner circle of the Hellfire Club. Pierce refashions the Reavers into a paramilitary group with the explicit aim of exterminating the X-Men and mutantkind in general, allying themselves with Lady Deathstrike in the process. Although the X-Men escape when Pierce’s Ravagers return to their former Australian enclave, Wolverine returns from Madripoor and finds himself outnumbered, left to be tortured and crucified by the group before eventually being rescued by Jubilee.
This iteration of the Reavers meets their end a few years later when they are almost entirely wiped out by the Upstarts in their point-scoring game of mutant eradication, but they have appeared in many iterations since and largely continue to harass the X-Men (and Wolverine in particular, at the behest of Lady Deathstrike).
Who: The Sentinel Program
Would it be an X-Men game without a Sentinel appearance? Funnily enough, there is a slight connection between the Reavers and the Sentinels in the comics—the Upstarts member Trevor Fitzroy exterminates the Reavers using reprogrammed versions of the anti-mutant giant robots, although whether or not this Sentinel we see in the trailer is connected to Wolverine‘s take on the Reavers remains to be seen.
But yes, you know the Sentinels by this point: one of contemporary mutantkind’s oldest foes, the X-Men have been battling iteration after iteration of Bolivar Trask’s robotic exterminators since the very beginning. To bring it back to our first point, even the Canadian government built its own Sentinel program at one point, showing that the human dream of using giant purple robots to try and wipe out mutantkind will never truly die. The one glimpsed in the trailer, at least, is very much in the traditional Sentinel mold (not to be confused with the Master Mold, of course), rather than any of the more out-there advanced Sentinels like Nimrod or Bastion’s Prime Sentinels.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
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James Whitbrook
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