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There has been no shortage of stories over the years about the development of the first Pirates of the Caribbean film and the lack of confidence in the movie from Disney executives. But perhaps nowhere is this more apparent (to me, at least!) than Disney's reluctance to release a proper video game tie-in for the film.
If you were a video game fan in 2003 who had just come home from seeing the film and wanted to experience the swashbuckling story of undead pirates and cursed Aztec gold at home on your platform of choice, then you were bound to be disappointed. That's because the console game was little more than a reskinned version of a pre-existing Russian pirate game with Keira Knightley's voice, while the handheld version from Pocket Studios also seemed to have little to do with the blockbuster film, serving as a prequel and lacking the likeness rights for many of the film's main cast.
Late last month, Time Extension interviewed Ken Christiansen, a former concept artist at Disney Interactive, leading to some articles about some of the video game pitches and projects he was involved with at the company. During this conversation, he gave an insight into why the initial Pirates games turned out the way they did, stating that the thrown-together nature of these titles was the result of Disney focusing much of its attention on creating a game to tie in with the 2003 Eddie Murphy project The Haunted Mansion.
Additionally, he also let us know some details about a pitch he worked on in 2004 for the next film in the series, which he states was almost developed by Stormfront Studios (the company behind the popular The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers game).
"It was probably in 2001, we got on our desks the scripts for The Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean," Christiansen recalled. "And I remember my exact comments to my producers were: 'Well, Pirates is a game. This is a no-brainer. Haunted Mansion isn't a game.
"Pirates of the Caribbean just seemed like it was going to be an awesome movie," he continued. "And this was before it was Jack Sparrow, when it was just kind of an action-man character, because there was no Johnny Depp performance or anything in the script. Anyway, we had our weekly meeting with the whole group, all the producers, the two artists, and then our boss. And he was like, 'Okay, well, we're going to table Pirates of the Caribbean; the company really wants to focus on Mansion. And I remember me and the senior producer who I'd been working with looking at each other like, 'This is a mistake.'
"I don't know what the whole thing was, but if I had to guess, they were pushing Haunted Mansion because it had Eddie Murphy in it. They were writing a script for him, while Pirates was just an action movie and pirate films always fail. So the push internally was, 'focus on Mansion and forget Pirates.'"
This eventually resulted in the licensed 3D adventure title for PS2, Xbox, and GameCube, from High Voltage Software and TDK Mediactive, which, ironically, didn't end up including Eddie Murphy at all and ultimately received average reviews, at best.
As Christiansen recalls, while development on the Haunted Mansion game was still ongoing, the attitude within Disney shifted, with execs starting to favour Pirates after some enthusiastic early screenings. Because of this, it was decided that Pirates should have a console game, after all.
"The feeling was that Haunted Mansion was gonna tank, but Pirates was getting such a huge response from previews," said Christiansen. "So Disney started freaking out. We were being told, 'Oh, we need to have a game for this,' but it was like, 'Too late. We needed to start a year ago when we told you this was the game to make.' So what they did was Bethesda had a pirate game where it was just ship combat, and so they just had them redress it for pirates. Keira Knightley did a voice for it, but it wasn't a great game to begin with, and then they just slapped the Pirates of the Caribbean title on it and shipped it."
Remarkably, though, this isn't where the story ends, as, according to Christiansen, in the aftermath of Pirates coming out, there were also discussions about Disney Interactive partnering with Stormfront Studios to create a multiplayer Pirates game in a similar style to their Two Towers title.
"We had a guy that I couldn't stand," said Christiansen. "He was our boss's boss. We had a big meeting, and we had no idea what the next movie was going to be, and he said, 'We're going to make a Pirates game, but we need to stick to the real world. Let's keep it grounded in reality.' Meanwhile, I'm thinking, 'There's skeletons walking around in the first one. What are you talking about? There's not going to be any fantasy? Think of every piece of pirate lore that can be explored. That is all on the table for us to use now!' So inevitably we were like, 'Let's ignore that and do some crazy shit, like Gryphons and leviathans.' I would have put an elephant on a fish tail if I'd had time.
"We were talking with the guys at this Bay Area company, who did the Two Towers game, which was a really fun game, and they were kind of selling us on their engine. Like, 'Hey, if you're looking to publish games, consider us to like redress this kind of stuff,' and we thought it would be perfect for Pirates. So I started catering the concept art for that style of play where you would have multiple guys travelling together."
As Christiansen told me, all the pieces seemed to be lining up, but then during the concept phase, Disney Interactive laid off its few remaining internal concept artists at Disney Interactive, including Christiansen.
Christiansen would later return to the company as a freelance artist, but as he remembers, he was soon told to move on to developing concepts for Tron 3.0 instead, an unreleased follow-up to the 2003 game from Monolith Productions.
Following this, Disney would never end up developing this Pirates game into a retail game, with the only titles published to tie in with the second film, Dead Men's Chest, being a set of underwhelming handheld efforts from companies like Griptonite Games and Amaze Entertainment.
If you're interested, you can check out Christiansen's artwork for the proposed game over on his website.