With Deadpool and Wolverine recently landing in cinemas, there have been a few people who have taken it as an opportunity to revisit Activision and High Moon Studios' 2013 action-adventure based on "The Merc with a Mouth", which has led to an old rumour about the game resurfacing.
This rumour states that the Deadpool game cost a (then) whopping $100 million dollars to develop, making it one of the most expensive video game titles of the time. And if you visit the page for the "List of most expensive video games to develop" on Wikipedia, sure enough, you'll find Deadpool situated on one of the available lists (under press estimations), among the likes of Red Dead Redemption II, Grand Theft Auto V, and Disney Infinity. The source for the claim seems to be an old Gamespot article from July 2015, which was later taken down but seems to live on through syndication via sites like Yahoo and others who have appeared to parrot its claim online.
Interestingly, though, there doesn't seem to be any actual sales data to back up this claim and one of its developers Chris Baker (who worked as an interactive manager at Marvel Games at the time) has even come out recently to debunk this fact on Reddit, before asking journalists on Twitter to squash the rumour once and for all. Baker was even able to find an earlier article from MoneyNation from March 2015, which instead suggests the game cost $102,100,246 (again the article doesn't actually provide a source for that number).
We love a good challenge here at Time Extension, so reached out to everyone we could who was involved with the game at Activision and High Moon and have managed to get a few responses so far.
Sadly, no one would comment officially on the actual cost of the game (video game companies are notoriously cagey about sharing financial data and individual developers are even more so), but we were at least able to get a couple of additional sources from High Moon that seem to imply they didn't know anything about where this number came from or how it was reached.
The prevailing theory, shared by Baker, seems to be that the number might have been pulled from a joke within the game itself, which sees Deadpool go ridiculously over budget "on explosions and tacky graphics", forcing its developer High Moon to create a top-down Zelda NES style stage to bring down costs.
Bizarrely, though, the money counter included in this section never reaches anywhere close to $102,100,246, stopping at around $7.5 million (thanks for the correction Chris Baker) which is slightly more reasonable.
We'll keep you posted if we receive any more replies about the actual cost of the game, but for now, it might be best to take that number being shared with a huge grain of salt.