Trivia / X-Men: Destiny

• Celebrity Voice Actor: Prior to the release, Activision made a big deal about the involvement of Jamie Chung (Aimi), Scott Porter (Adrian), and Milo Ventimiglia (Grant).
• Creator Killer: While not the reason for developer Silicon Knights' ultimate demise — that would be the lawsuit against Epic Games — the game's poor sales certainly didn't help, as it and the previous commercial failure of Too Human barely gave them the money to fund development of future games, much less shoulder the financial burden inflicted from losing the lawsuit and needing to pay millions to Epic (on top of being forced to scrap all their current work). X-Men: Destiny would be their final game as a result, and the studio would close down in 2014.
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: It didn't make it into the final game, but in the prototype there was a fight against Juggernaut where the objective was to attack him until his health bar was depleted. Staff members more familiar with the source material said that Marvel would never approve of the fight due to it conflicting with canon (Juggernaut isn't a mutant; his powers are magic-based, thus he's one of the few Marvel characters who is truly invulnerable). These concerns were ignored on the basis that these were pointless nitpicks and no one would actually care. When the boss fight was submitted for approval, Marvel's rejection was also accompanied by them shipping several copies of the Marvel Encyclopedia: X-Men book to the studio.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Due to losing the lawsuit with Epic Games, X-Men: Destiny had all unsold copies recalled thanks to the game engine containing stolen code, with the source code for the game also being deleted. While SK's other game, Too Human, was eventually made available for free via its publisher (Microsoft) on digital storefronts, this game's poor reception and Activision losing the X-Men video game license a few years later means this title is unlikely to make a reappearance.
• Not Screened for Critics: The game was only made available for critics to review a day before its release date.
• Playing Against Type: Alexander Polinsky (Control Freak, Headmaster, Argit) as Toad.
• Pre-Order Bonus: Juggernaut and Havok's suits and X-genes were pre-order bonuses. Most of the time pre-order bonuses are later made available for download online, but with developer Silicon Knights out of business and the game delisted from Xbox Live and PSN networks, no such luck here. Juggernaut's gear was made available normally on later-released discs, but if you didn't pre-order, you'll never be able to obtain the Havok gear.
• Role Reprise:
  • In addition to Steve Blum as (to no one's surprise) Wolverine, there's Fred Tatasciore as The Juggernaut from X2: Wolverine's Revenge. Their Wolverine and the X-Men co-stars Nolan North, Phil LaMarr, and Kari Wahlgren also reprise the repsective roles of Cyclops, Gambit, and Emma Frost, while Blum also reprises the role of Pyro from The Super Hero Squad Show.
  •  However, despite voicing the character in WatXM, Yuri Lowenthal doesn't reprise the role of Iceman, instead reprises his Spider-Man: Web of Shadows role as Nightcrawler, as well as voicing Northstar, while Jason Marsden voices Iceman instead.
• Troubled Production: Two accounts on the game's difficult development exist, those from mostly anonymous sources that worked at Silicon Knights that would also be collaborated by named employees years later, and one from CEO Denis Dyack in direct response to these claims. The former insist that Dyack carries much of the responsibility for the game's failure, as he had become increasingly controlling and combative since ending the studio's partnership with Nintendo, undergoing power trips and reveling in corporate mismanagement. Dyack supposedly wasn't a fan of the X-Men property and only saw the project as a stopgap before SK's next big thing, stalling communications with Activision in order to funnel the resources intended for Destiny to his preferred projects for as long as possible; Activision got fed-up by this behavior and decided to publicly announce the game and its release date in retaliation, forcing Silicon Knights to rush out a game which was already undergoing development woes due to that aforementioned apathy from Dyack under a tight 12 month deadline. When explaining the game's development himself years later, Dyack claimed that such reports were nothing but libel, putting all the blame on behind-the-scenes licensing problems that resulted from Disney's acquisition of Marvel midway during development. Activision and Disney got into disagreements over the existing contract, causing the budget to both shrink in the process; Activision also failed to pay Silicon Knights during this time, forcing the studio to fund development themselves, while Disney also couldn't do anything to help the project thanks to that complicated contract.

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