7 of our favorite Easter eggs in Marvel Rivals

The Marvel Cinematic Universe cast a long shadow. Beginning with 2008’s Iron Man, you could track the impact of the MCU simply by looking at the characters who came into and went out of focus across Marvel’s comics and various multimedia adaptations. Tony Stark was in, and—after 30-plus years of domination—the X-Men were out.

That’s one of the things that makes Marvel Rivals, now available for free on the Epic Games Store, so fascinating for long-time Marvel fans: It’s arguably the first post-MCU project. While there are still a few visible influences from the movies, such as Star-Lord and Peni Parker making the base roster, Marvel Rivals is based on the comics first and foremost.

Even better, it’s not content to stick with simple entry-level references. While you lose nothing if you don’t have a Ph.D. in Marvel trivia, Marvel Rivals features a huge collection of inside jokes and deep cuts. Here’s a list of seven of our favorite Easter eggs in Marvel Rivals.

HERBIE the Robot

There are quite a few surprise characters in Marvel Rivals. Galacta is the most obvious—she first appeared in a questionably canon 2009 comic by Adam Warren and Hector Sevilla Lujan and had all of two appearances until she was tapped to serve as Marvel Rivals’ announcer and tutor.

Then there’s HERBIE (Highly Engineered Robot Built for Interdimensional Exploration), who entered the fray alongside the Fantastic Four in Marvel Rivals’ first season. In Marvel Rivals, HERBIE is Reed’s robotic assistant, and serves as an objective in one of the Eternal Night maps. When you fight in Midtown, you’ll either defend or attack HERBIE as he helps to scan all the lost pages of the Darkhold.

HERBIE is a deep cut for all but the oldest Marvel nerds. He dates back to the short-lived 1978 cartoon The New Fantastic Four, in which HERBIE replaced Johnny Storm on the team. The old urban legend was that studio executives had vetoed Johnny due to concerns that impressionable children would try to imitate the Human Torch's powers by setting themselves on fire.

The actual truth, per comics historian Mark Evanier, is that Johnny was one of several Marvel characters who’d been licensed to Universal Pictures at the time. Since he wasn’t available to appear in the cartoon, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby designed HERBIE as a stand-in. He’s made a few appearances since then, usually as a cameo or in-joke, but Marvel Rivals is HERBIE’s closest shot at center stage since the ‘70s.

Marvel’s Dracula and the Montesi Formula

In Season One of Marvel Rivals and its Eternal Night Falls storyline, Dracula has imprisoned Blade and taken over much of New York. While you never actually fight vampires during a Marvel Rivals match (at least for now), maps like the Sanctum Sanctorum and Central Park show the scars of the Fantastic Four’s attempts to deal with Dracula.

For Marvel newcomers or fans coming over from the MCU, this may seem like a random pull, but Dracula has been a big part of the Marvel Universe since the ‘70s. Back then, creators like Marv Wolfman, Gene Colan, and Steve Gerber cut their teeth on horror comics like Tomb of Dracula, which featured a procession of vampire hunters on the trail of the title character.

The Montesi Formula was created during that run, a spell from the forbidden Darkhold that even a non-sorcerer could use to dispatch a vampire. Its more famous use came in 1983's Dr. Strange Vol 2 #62, where Stephen successfully cast the Montesi Formula and destroyed all existing vampires on Earth. Unfortunately, it didn’t last.

Now, in Marvel Rivals, players can brawl on the Central Park map over the chance to use the Montesi Formula once again.

Van Dyne’s

If you pay attention on the Midtown map in Marvel Rivals, you can find a ton of incidental Easter eggs from Marvel’s New York, including the Kingpin’s tower, the Oscorp building, and an ad for Luke Cage’s superhero business Heroes for Hire. Right near Avengers Tower, you can even find an upscale fashion boutique called Van Dyne’s, which also has a billboard on a bus stop near one team’s starting zone.

Janet Van Dyne, the Wasp, is of interest to long-time Marvel fans as she’s often the forgotten Avenger. In the comics, she’s one of the founding members, led the team for years, and is actually the one who came up with the team’s name. She hasn’t been a core Avenger since the early 2000s, however.

Janet’s real problem is that Marvel adaptations never show her the same way twice. In the MCU, Janet was a secret agent who went missing for decades before Scott Lang managed to rescue her. In the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes cartoon, Janet is a college student and Hank Pym’s lab assistant. And in the Ultimate Marvel continuity, Janet was introduced as a genius scientist in her own right, Hank’s wife, and a mutant.

In the core Marvel Universe, however, Janet is an old-money socialite from New Jersey who began her superhero career as Hank Pym’s partner. For quite a while, one of Janet’s big character tics was that she never wore a single costume for long, which eventually led to her taking up a new career as an upscale fashion designer. Now, in Marvel Rivals, you can wreck her store in Manhattan if you like.

As a bonus reference, Van Dyne’s shop has a sign in it that reads “Timely Trend.” Timely Comics was the original name of the publisher that would eventually become Marvel.

The Klyntar and Knull

Both the Klyntar and Knull are a good example of how Marvel Rivals, unlike most Marvel adaptations, is willing to draw on recent comic storylines. The Symbiotic Surface map is set on the Klyntars’ planet—also known as Klyntar—and challenges players to either prevent or enable access to the prison of the dark god Knull.

Klyntar is the adopted home planet of the symbiote race, which provides characters like Venom and Carnage with their powers. While the symbiotes have been a fixture of Marvel Comics since the late ‘80s (when one went to Earth masquerading as Spider-Man’s new black costume) it took quite a while for writers to get around to giving their species or homeworld a name.

In the comics, Klyntar was used as the prison for the dark god Knull, and was destroyed when it escaped. Knull was subsequently deposed and killed by Eddie Brock.

Knull, or at least his logo, also recently appeared as a sort of extended cameo in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2.

Alchemax and Stark-Fujikawa

One of the first big surprises of Marvel Rivals was its emphasis on Marvel 2099. This is more in focus at the moment than it’s been for quite a while, due to Miguel O’Hara’s appearance in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, but it’s a relatively rare sight in Marvel adaptations—Spider-Man: Edge of Time notwithstanding.

In Marvel Rivals, the 2099 maps represent both Peni Parker’s home turf and the Spider-Islands, home to the reality-fixer Spider-Zero. They’re some of the earliest settings that Marvel Rivals ever released, and serve as an extended mash-up of concepts from 2099 and both the comics’ and films’ takes on their respective Spider-Verses.

Marvel 2099 is a relatively short-lived comics imprint that started in 1992 as a cyberpunk take on several of Marvel’s core characters. Set over 100 years into the future of the Marvel Universe, it featured several newcomers who took over the legacies of various heroes, in a dark corporate-run future where the “Age of Heroes” had ended decades prior under mysterious circumstances.

This included a new Spider-Man (Miguel O’Hara), a new team of X-Men trying to survive as refugees, a runaway hacker who became a Ghost Rider, a cult dedicated to the worship of Thor, and (perhaps most memorably) a time-stranded Dr. Doom who eventually seized control of the United States. If you keep your eyes peeled on the Shin-Shibuya map, you might even see a news broadcast on one of the screens about Doom’s takeover.

As you might expect from a cyberpunk-inspired setting, two of the major antagonists of Marvel 2099 were mega-corporations. One, Stark-Fujikawa, was an unexplained merger between Stark Industries and a Japanese company, while the other, Alchemax, was a quietly malevolent research lab that happened to employ Miguel. The Fujikawas subsequently appeared in Iron Man’s solo comic in the late ‘90s, as foreshadowing for a possible future—although that subplot appears to have been dropped ages ago.

Marvel Rivals’ 2099 version of Tokyo is primarily dedicated to Peni Parker’s home turf, but as you fight through the streets, you can find and wreck branch locations for both Alchemax and Stark-Fujikawa.

The Midnight Mission

The Sanctum Sanctorum map, which is currently only available during free-for-all Doom Matches, is small but dense with both ambush opportunities and shout-outs. Dr. Strange fans can find all sorts of old artifacts, including the Wand of Watoomb. The kitchen also features a nod to the gross cuisine Stephen favored in the Jason Aaron/Chris Bachalo run of comics. And the paintings on the walls of the central room include Strange’s bodyguard Wong as well as Zelma Stanton, who’s currently a teacher at the Marvel magic school the Strange Academy.

If you make it outside during a Doom Match, however, you might find your way to an Egyptian-themed building called “Mr. Knight’s Agency,” with a worse-for-wear white limousine parked a little ways down the street. The building is also known as the Midnight Mission, the current operating headquarters for Moon Knight. This is where he, in his guise as “Mr. Knight,” makes himself available to help anyone who comes to the building by night.

As Mr. Knight, who operates in a white suit, tie, and face mask, Moon Knight also employs a self-driving limo and moon-shaped drone. Marvel Rivals’ limo has taken some damage, which suggests that Moon Knight has probably run over some vampires with it, given the circumstances.

Bats the Ghost Dog

Your next favorite character is a dead basset hound.

Bats the Ghost Dog can be found on the intro screen to the Sanctum Sanctorum map, as well as randomly roaming around the Sanctum’s lobby in-game. If you speak to Bats as Thor, Spidey, Jeff, or Squirrel Girl, you unlock the A Hounding Conversation achievement.

Bats is Dr. Strange’s newest sidekick, and a relatively recent introduction to Marvel’s stable of characters. He first appeared back in 2017 in Dr. Strange’s solo book as an elderly basset hound under Stephen’s care, at a point in time when Stephen had taken a job as a veterinarian.

Bats was willing to take Loki on to protect Stephen, and when Bats’ heart gave out, Loki turned Bats into a ghost as a form of apology. Since then, Bats has lived at Dr. Strange’s house. As long-time Marvel readers know, Stephen cannot hold onto the title of Sorcerer Supreme for love or money. He’s lost his job no fewer than 3 separate times in the last 20 years or so, and at time of writing, he’s had his title stolen by none other than Victor Von Doom.

Marvel Rivals is free to play on the Epic Games Store.