One of our favourite subgenres of licensed games is when a developer takes an established IP and pretty much decides to do whatever it wants with it, essentially using it to make the game of their dreams.
In the past, for instance, we've spoken to Digital Eclipse's president Mika Mika briefly about how that studio once ended up using a Lilo & Stitch license for the Game Boy Advance as an opportunity to create their very own Metal Slug run 'n gunner and covered the unusual case of Doki Denki Studio's Piglet's Big Game, which ended up going viral last year after being compared to Silent Hill and Resident Evil online.
It appears, though, that there are even more examples of this than even we were initially aware of, with Mike Mika recently taking to social media to reflect on the time he used the video game license to the 2006 fantasy film Charlotte Web (itself based on the E.B White book) to make a homage to Jordan's Mechner Apple II platformer Prince of Persia for the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS.
Developed at Backbone Entertainment (a studio that was the result of a merger between developers Digital Eclipse and ImaginEngine) for Sega, and released in 2006 to coincide with the film, it was apparently a game that the team referred to internally as "Pig of Persia", thanks to Wilbur the Pig essentially parkouring his way through the game's many levels.
Mika writes:
"Every now and again I reflect on our Charlotte's Web GBA game we produced at Backbone. It was an action platform game that had Wilbur leaping around on platforms. We referred to it internally as "Pig of Persia," in honor of Prince of Persia, the game we absurdly based it on."
In the past, when we've spoken to Mika about how he managed to create projects like Lilo & Stitch, where they pretty much had carte blanche to do what they wanted, he said that it was primarily due to the publishers and license holders not really paying much attention to the handheld market, as long as they got a finished product at the end of it.
As a result, teams were allowed to experiment with different ideas and concepts, which, in the case of Digital Eclipse and Backbone, typically meant taking inspiration from the titles that inspired them to make games in the first place.
Have you played "Pig of Persia" before? What did you think? Let us know in the comments!