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Michael Jackson is no stranger to video games, having famously collaborated with Sega on several projects in the '90s, including arcade and console titles based on his 1988 film Moonwalker.
But what you might not know (we certainly didn't) is he almost made another game in the 2000s with the developer behind Enter the Matrix, Shiny Entertainment, which, for better or worse, never saw the light of day.
David Perry, the founder of Shiny, revealed the existence of the talks between Shiny and the King of Pop in a recent blog post published on his website earlier this week, sharing the story due to Jackson once again being back in the news thanks to the success of the Antoine Fuqua-directed biopic, Michael, starring the singer's nephew Jaafar Jackson.
In this post, he described how Jackson was a huge Matrix fan and that he got in touch with the studio, hoping to play an early version of Enter the Matrix at Neverland Ranch before it released. As a result, Perry travelled down to Jackson's home, describing the place as "a child’s imagination built at full scale by someone who actually had the resources to do it" and describing the events of a spontaneous egg fight, which broke out, in which he almost hit Jackson's son square in the face.
This is admittedly just a prelude to the real story, though, which is that after Enter the Matrix released, Jackson invited Perry back to Neverland to help him think about "a Michael Jackson video game," leading to talks between Perry, Jackson, and Perry's "writer friend" David Freeman about a potential project.
"The important thing is that we were not trying to make a vanity project," Perry wrote. "The obvious version would have been 'Michael Jackson: The Game,' where you play as Michael, dance, perform, maybe fight bad guys with music. But that was not the interesting version. Michael had already done Moonwalker. We wanted something bigger and more surprising.
"The concept we explored was a serious, cinematic, third-person action-adventure game. Michael would not be the main character. Instead, he would bring something more powerful: original music, imagination, access to the worlds of film and celebrity, and his unique sense of wonder."
As Perry states, the project went through "many names and shapes" during these conversations, including The Final War, Solo, The Darkness, and "eventually Dark Rim," with one recurring gameplay idea that seemed to interest people being the concept of "remote possession." Players would be able to fly over "a battlefield through the eyes of an eagle", and then transfer their spirit into another character and control them.
"You might possess an enemy to open a gate, or take over a creature and turn it against its master," he went on to explain in the blog. "The idea was not just to give the player weapons, but to give them powers that changed how they thought about space, identity, and control."
He added, "There were gifted children in villages who could teach you unique abilities. There were battles that were not just fights, but wars already in motion when you arrived. There were villains manipulating kingdoms from behind a veil. There were ideas about illusion, sound, magic, and the mind. It was ambitious. Maybe too ambitious. But that was the point."
Perhaps the most fascinating idea related to the project understandably had very little to do with the gameplay, but more to do with the music, with the Shiny founder pitching the idea of exclusively releasing Jackson's next album inside a game, something the singer actually seemed to entertain (though he knew his record label wouldn't feel the same). This was Perry's idea to "Bring together the video game industry, the movie industry, and the music industry in one project," expanding on his attempts to bring Hollywood and video games closer together with Enter the Matrix.
As he explained, "The reason I liked the idea was simple: more people needed to play video games, and he agreed. At the time, games were already enormous, but there were still millions of people who did not really understand them. They thought games were for someone else, for kids, or teenagers, or 'gamers.' But Michael’s audience was global. It crossed generations, countries, and cultures. If the only way to hear his next album was to play a video game, then a huge number of people would play a video game for the first time. We discussed that his record company would initially freak out, until they heard that a deluxe album would follow the game release."
At this point, you're probably curious why the project never happened, and it's here that Perry leaves things slightly ambiguous, simply stating "life took its turn." Because of this, the project "remained an exploration: meetings, documents, concepts, artwork, possibilities," with the team never actually signing a "contract to publish the game." Sadly, Perry has also declined to release any materials, but assures readers "the conversations were real, and the idea still feels meaningful" to him.
He finished by writing, "Sometimes the projects that never ship still leave a mark. This one certainly did for me. It reminded me that the best creative ideas often begin as a slightly insane question: What if the only way to hear Michael Jackson’s next album was to play a video game? And for one brief moment at Neverland, that did not sound insane at all."
Jackson passed away on June 25th, 2009. During his career, he sold an estimated 500 million copies worldwide, making him one of the most successful recording artists of all time, and went on to inspire generation after generation of recording artists. His personal life, however, has been the source of constant scrutiny, both prior to and after his death, with public accusations of child sexual abuse leading to investigations into the singer beginning in 1993 and 2003.
In the first case, a civil action was settled out of court in 1994, with no criminal charges being filed, while in the latter case, a criminal case was brought against the singer before Jackson was acquitted on all counts in 2005.