Rock Paper Shotgun's Co-Founder Wrote Marvel Tokon's Story

Before Kieron Gillen was writing Immortal X-Men or Star Wars: Doctor Aphra, he was reviewing games. He wrote for Eurogamer and EDGE, and in 2007 he co-founded Rock Paper Shotgun, one of the most respected PC gaming sites on the internet. He left journalism for comics full-time around 2010, and now, sixteen years later, he's back in the games space from the other side of the screen. Arc System Works announced on Bluesky that Gillen wrote the single-player Episode Mode for Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls.

Episode Mode features five separate stories, one for each of the game's teams, all building toward boss fights against two characters called the Promoter and the Champion. Each story is illustrated by a different artist, and the whole thing is presented like a playable comic book, with DualSense haptic features integrated on PS5. It's a structure that plays directly to Gillen's strengths. His comic work has always been heavy on team dynamics and ensemble casts, and a fighting game built around five distinct squads is a natural fit for that.

From Journalist to Story Lead

What makes this interesting beyond the announcement itself is how rare it is for someone to cross from games journalism into game development in this way. Plenty of journalists have moved into PR or community management. A few have gone into narrative design. But Gillen took the scenic route: journalism to comics to writing the single-player campaign for a major fighting game. I can't think of another example where a games journalist's career arc looped back around this cleanly. It also means the person writing Marvel Tōkon's story has an unusually deep understanding of what players actually want from a single-player mode in a fighting game, because he spent years covering them.

Gillen's comic credentials speak for themselves. His runs on Iron Man, the X-Men, and Young Avengers are widely regarded as some of the best Marvel work of the last decade. If you're going to hand someone five Marvel team stories and ask them to make players care about the narrative in a genre that rarely prioritizes it, Gillen is a strong pick. Arc System Works clearly isn't treating Episode Mode as an afterthought, and bringing in a writer of this calibre signals they want the single-player content to stand on its own rather than serve as a glorified tutorial.

The boss characters, the Promoter and the Champion, are obscure enough that speculation is already circling about whether they'll eventually join the playable roster as DLC fighters. Arc System Works has a history of turning boss characters into DLC in its Guilty Gear and BlazBlue games, so it wouldn't be surprising. The game has an exclusive panel at San Diego Comic-Con coming up, which could be where the Year 1 Character Pass lineup gets revealed.

Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls has its open beta running from July 24th to 26th, with the full launch set for August 6th on PS5 and PC. The confirmed roster sits at 20 characters, including Storm, Wolverine, Spider-Man, Doctor Doom, Deadpool, and Loki. As I covered earlier this week, dataminers may have already found two additional hidden fighters in the beta files.

The PSN linking requirement remains a shadow over the launch, with the game currently blocked in over 100 countries. But if the single-player writing lands as well as Gillen's comic work, Episode Mode could end up being the part of Marvel Tōkon that people talk about long after the meta settles. Fighting games rarely get writers who understand both the medium and the source material this well, and I'm curious to see what Gillen does with that.