Insomniac Removed “X-Men” From Their Wolverine Game In Latest DEI Move

Marvel’s Wolverine creative director Marcus Smith confirmed to Variety on June 3 that the X-Men do not exist in Insomniac’s version of the Marvel universe. “In our world, mutants aren’t really that well known throughout the world, so they’re mostly in hiding because they’re pretty vulnerable,” Smith explained. Instead of the X-Men, the game features a group called Team X, described as a globe-trotting group of mercenary mutants protecting others from capture.

Team X is a real entity in Marvel Comics with thirty years of documented history. It is not a heroic organization. Team X was a covert ops CIA team — the original test subjects of the Weapon X program — whose members included Wolverine, Sabretooth, Maverick, Silver Fox, Mastodon, and Kestrel. These were government black ops mercenaries who were subsequently subjected to memory implants, healing factor experiments, and ultimately Weapon X’s adamantium bonding process. The Team X of Marvel Comics history is a trauma organization, not a heroic mutant protection squad. Its members were experimented on, psychologically manipulated, and weaponized by the state. Wolverine spent decades trying to recover the memories Team X stole from him.

Insomniac’s Team X is described as something structurally opposite — a protective organization of mercenary mutants saving others from capture. The name is borrowed from a dark chapter in Wolverine’s history and repurposed as a hero team. Whether this is creative reinvention or a choice made without full awareness of the source material’s connotations is not clarified by Smith’s interview.

What the community is focused on is not the comics history angle. It is the simpler observation: the game is called Wolverine. The X-Men have been removed from it. The word “men” has been eliminated from the franchise. In a game that already features Sweet Baby Inc. consulting involvement confirmed by the narrative director herself, that carries a specific signal.

Sweet Baby Inc. is confirmed on the project. Insomniac narrative director Mary Kenney publicly defended them in a 12-post X thread, calling them “one of the finest in the biz.” The original creative director Brian Horton departed mid-development. Jean Grey’s design was redesigned from earlier leaked versions that showed a more attractive character toward what fans describe as a deliberately de-glamorized appearance. The game’s director called Wolverine’s redesigned aesthetic an effort to avoid Logan appearing like a “sadist,” a characterization of the character’s canonical violence as a presentation problem to be managed rather than a feature of who he is.

Now the X-Men have been written out of the universe entirely and replaced with a team whose name in actual Marvel history belongs to a covert CIA black ops program that was the origin of Wolverine’s trauma.

The creative director’s framing for the absence of the X-Men is that mutants are mostly in hiding, making Professor Xavier’s school a premature institution in this timeline. That is a legitimate narrative choice for an origin-era Wolverine story. The question the FP audience is asking is not whether the X-Men can be narratively absent. It is whether the decision to name the replacement organization Team X — stripping “men” from the equation entirely and substituting a name that carries no heroic weight in the source material — reflects the same editorial priorities that Sweet Baby Inc.’s involvement and the Jean Grey redesign do.

Insomniac made the Wolverine game the existing fanbase wanted to see — then systematically adjusted it in the direction Sweet Baby Inc. and its consulting philosophy points. The absence of X-Men in a Wolverine game is not a deal-breaker. The accumulation of decisions is.

Does removing the X-Men from Insomniac’s Wolverine universe concern you about the game’s direction? Let us know in the comments.

450 pages of classic superhero storytelling that puts character first. The Flying Sparks Omnibus collects the complete saga of Meta-Girl — the kind of cape comic the mainstream forgot how to make. Sign up to get your copy.