Invincible vs

When I visited Skybound Entertainment to preview Invincible VS ahead of its June reveal, I left struck by how polished and explosive the 3v3 fighter already felt. The game blends frantic, over-the-top combat with a faithful sense of the source material—unsurprising given the team includes writers and artists from the show and comics alongside developers who previously worked on the Killer Instinct reboot. With the roster steadily expanding to include characters such as Cecil Stedman, the tag-team fighter is shaping up to be exactly the sort of project long-time fans have hoped for.

I didn’t get to play as Cecil myself—unlike Invincible, Atom Eve, Bulletproof, and Thula, which I sampled in May—but I was shown an advance gameplay trailer. Cecil’s kit appears unexpectedly technical: he deploys gadgets, teleports around the stage, and even summons ReAnimen to control space and pressure opponents.

“It would have been really easy for us to just have him be a ‘Man in the Ear,’ but we wanted to do something more than that,” narrative director Michael Rogers says. “Cecil is a fan favorite of a lot of people on the team, myself included, and the way we figured it out was just being inventive. I had a wishlist of things that I wanted in the game from a story perspective, and that was teleportation, the White Room, ReAnimen, and all of those things were things that our combat designers already had on their brain.”

The playable roster already includes Invincible, Omni-Man, Atom Eve, Bulletproof, Thula, Rex Splode, and Battle Beast. Notably, Cecil is the first revealed fighter without innate superpowers—his strength lies in battlefield control. “If you look at it from a gameplay perspective, you have all these different archetypes from grapplers to strikers to rush-down powerhouse characters that push you to corners, and then you have mid- and long-range characters,” executive producer Mike Willette explains. “The concept of Cecil, what he does is he manipulates and he can stay on the outside. So, in his kit, we have a lot of long-range weaponry, from his GDA tech, like his sonic mine, to the ReAnimen that he can call in, to the White Room, the orbital strike, the Flaxan weapons; he has all this stuff available to him. So, for him, he’s just setting up the battlefield. He’s setting up traps and things that you have to get around. […] He can’t fly, he doesn’t have a double-jump, so he takes advantage of his GDA tech and costing the taxpayers all that money by teleporting all around the stage.”

The Mysterious Story Mode

In Amazon Prime Video’s Invincible, Walton Goggins voices Cecil, and J.K. Simmons is confirmed to return as Omni-Man in the game—though Quarter Up has been cautious about announcing additional cast members. Voice work plays a meaningful role in both the combat and narrative beats, and the team intends story mode to be a larger, more cinematic experience.

The developers have long said a story mode exists, but specifics have been held tightly. During a follow-up conversation with the team, I pushed for more context, and they were able to share a bit more about their goals.

“The idea is that it’s a standalone narrative set in the Invincible universe,” Rogers says. “We wanted story mode to feel like an episode of the show that you would play; that was our approach with it. I was lucky enough to work with Helen Leigh, who’s one of the writers from the show, and a close collaboration with [co-creator] Robert Kirkman. […] We wanted to create this sort of specialized, specific, standalone piece of story that also feels like it fits and is right at home in the universe.”

Rogers hinted there’s a narrative justification for making Cecil playable—he isn’t just a novelty pulled into combat. “Being able to bring him out of the ‘Guy in the Ear’ and put him actually on the fight line gave us a lot more to play with in the story,” Rogers told us, adding that every revealed playable character so far ties into the narrative in some fashion.

The team also wrote with a particular era of the Invincible timeline in mind, which influenced character portrayals—especially Mark Grayson. “We wanted to make sure that Mark felt like the right Mark, and in the right time and space. You can see from the gameplay we’ve released for him, he’s got some of that whimsy that you see in a younger Mark space, but he’s also got a little more of that seriousness that you sometimes see in Mark as he’s growing as a superhero and learning,” Rogers says.

A New Character Debuts

Before we wrapped, Willette prodded Rogers to reveal what he called a “super secret thing”: Quarter Up and Skybound collaborated to design a brand-new character created specifically for Invincible VS. Rogers was clearly excited but reserved about details.

“We’re going to have a brand-new character who has not appeared anywhere in the Invincible VS universe, in story and in the game,” Rogers says. “Honestly, it was so exciting to be able to bring someone brand new and bring them into this, into the story, and into the universe. I’m bursting to tell you more, but I will be in so much trouble.”

The team leaned on close collaboration with Skybound to make the addition feel authentic. “Across the board, the creators are heavily involved in this project, and I think that’s one of the privileges of being first-party [to Skybound],” art director Dan Eder says. “We’re a part of Skybound, so we have the right access to them, and they are super hyped about the game; they were involved from day one. A lot of the major decisions, we brainstorm with them, with the new character, with some of our existing characters, or certain story elements, and so we want to get their first impression and first reactions, and then we go from there. Who knows these characters better than the people who created them? We want to make sure that it’s an authentic experience, but also that we’re able to have our own special footprint when it comes to the game and how we show another side of the characters that you wouldn’t have been able to see in other media.”

Invincible VS is scheduled for release on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC in 2026. For a longer hands-on preview and additional impressions, see our deep-dive preview here.