Monolith Productions — the company behind games like No One Lives Forever, F.E.A.R, and Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor — once pitched a video game adaptation of John Carpenter's 1986 film Big Trouble In Little China to Fox. That's according to a recent interview between Time Extension and the former Monolith artist Mattthew Allen.
According to Allen, the pitch happened following the release of the Ice-T-led action-adventure game Sanity: Aiken's Artifact, which was published by Fox Interactive in the year 2000, with the latter company offering Monolith a choice of IPs that it could potentially work on next.
On that list was the cult-supernatural action film, which famously starred Kurt Russell as the truck diver Jack Burton journey who ventures into dark and mysterious underbelly of San Francisco's Chinatown, to save his friend's fiancée.
"I got a list of every single Fox IP," Allen tells us. "Literally they printed out a list of all the IP Fox owns because Fox was interested in us pitching stuff. So they just dumped a stack of IPs on us and said, 'Which ones look cool to you?' The two that I was super interested in, because I was a nerd were Big Trouble In Little China and Blade Runner. But there were also some cartoon ones, because they had some Hanna-Barbera stuff. And so Garrett Price (one of Monolith's original co-founders) and I pitched a Big Trouble in Little China game post-Sanity."
Sadly, when pressed, Allen couldn't remember much about this pitch, suggesting it likely ended up being just a 2-page treatment, but offered up the following about what it might have potentially looked like.
"I know both of us were super into all of the the Chinese fantasy mythology stuff that John Carpenter was doing," he told us. "Even though a lot of that is weird and off, there was something like really sweet about it. And so I think both of us were really interested in that. And we had just come off of Sanity, so like lightning, fire, weird elemental shit, that was where our brains were at.
"It would still be Jack Burton, but god yeah, thinking about it now, I think I would probably pitch a different pantheon. Maybe he's got to kick the shit out of some Norse Gods or something. There are definitely other things you can do with that."
As Allen tells us, the reason the game never ended up happening is that Fox never greenlit the project for development. Instead, the Sanity team ending up working on the PS2 port of No One Lives Forever during this period, before eventually getting an offer from Disney to work on a video game sequel to Tron.
If you've been following Time Extension for a while, you'll know Monolith Productions isn't the only company to be unsuccessful in getting a Big Trouble In Little China game off the ground.
Last year, Scott Miller — the founder of 3D Realms and Apogee — shared a completely separate, unrelated pitch for a Big Trouble In Little China game, which he had tried to get greenlit shortly before Disney began its acquisition of Fox, in 2017.
That game, according to the slides Miller published online, would have seen Burton returning to battle the the Lords of Death gang, and sorcerer aliens from space (inspired by Jack's line: "A man would have to be some kinda fool to think we're all alone in this universe."), and would also have featured bullet-time mechanics (based on another classic Jack Burton line: "It's all in the reflexes").
However, it never ended up happening, with Fox putting all such deals on hold, when Disney began to buy the company. Because of this, Electric Dream Software's 1980s beat 'em up Big Trouble In Little China for the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, and Commodore 64 remains the only official video game adaptation made to this day.