Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy Deepfake Adds Chris Pratt to the Game

In case you missed it, it was announced this past weekend that Square Enix and Eidos-Montreal will release Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, a new video game that is exactly what it says on the tin, later this year, and it features new versions of iconic characters Star-Lord, Gamora, Drax, Rocket Raccoon, and Groot, among others. Notably, these are characters that have absolutely benefited from the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, so it should not be surprising that someone has already made a deepfake video that inserts Chris Pratt, who plays Star-Lord in the movies, into the video game.

The deepfake, which you can check out above, was made by stryder HD, who regularly creates what they call "conceptual fan art videos using some deepfake technology" as well as other techniques. It's about half impressive, half extremely uncanny. To be clear, the developers at Eidos-Montreal were very aware of the different iconic takes on these characters already, and that includes Star-Lord. According to our interview with them, the end result is the product of several iterations and steps to make sure it wasn't too much like anything else or too different that it would be unrecognizable.

"There was a lot of discussions around that," said Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy senior producer Olivier Proulx when asked about being too close or too far from the Marvel Cinematic Universe version of these characters. "We did some focus testing. Even when the game wasn't a game yet, but we have concept art and we had different art direction pieces, we could go to fans and just poll and hear what they say. Or we'd even do quantitative and have more data to help us and guide us along the way. Get Marvel's feedback.

"So that's something that was on top of our minds for many, many months, and I would say even a couple of years," he continued. "And once we started to build a game and have it come alive on screen, when we do play tests and we test the game with our players, that's something we polled them every time. Like, 'How do you feel about the characters and for each character?'"

As noted above, Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy is set to release for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC later this year on October 26th. It is available to pre-order now wherever such things are sold, and pre-ordering the title gets an outfit pack full of throwback outfits for the Guardians. You can check out all of our previous coverage of E3 2021 and all its announcements right here.

What do you think about what we have seen of Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy so far? What do you make of the deepfake featuring Chris Pratt? Let us know in the comments, or feel free to reach out and hit me up directly over on Twitter at @rollinbishop to talk about all things gaming!