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Back in 2013, publications like Siliconera and Nintendo Life both published articles about a number of Disney projects that never came to life.
The inspiration for these articles was a series of images posted to the former Disney Interactive concept artist Ken Christiansen's portfolio website, which documented some of the ideas that were being worked on behind closed doors. This included, among other things, a pitch for a Smash Bros-esque fighting game featuring various action figures of Disney characters facing off in battle.
At the time, Christiansen never publicly commented on any of this work, but recently, Time Extension got in touch with the artist to go over his amazing career in gaming. During this chat, he shared a little more insight into what this project was, crediting Kingdom Hearts with opening the floodgates to a number of ideas about Disney properties crossing over with one another.
If you look at Kingdom Hearts' credits, Christiansen is one of two "senior artists" credited on the project alongside Mary Ann Ramirez, who sadly passed away in 2017. As he admits, his involvement with the project was much more limited than Ramirez's, limited to contributing a few costume ideas for Donald and Goofy and concept art for the Monstro level, but regardless, it gave him an interesting insight into some of the issues Disney were having with the project behind the scenes, with one of the main area of concerns reportedly being how Disney characters would cross over into each other's world.
"One of the reasons Kingdom Hearts was so difficult to get started was because Disney was so reluctant to have that possibility of crossing over The Lion King into The Little Mermaid world," he told us. "That was the main hangup for Disney America. They couldn't get over that. So, I think there was maybe just a little bit of butting of heads, but it all worked out in the end. All of the creatives, though — like me, the other artists, and the producers — we all thought it was the greatest idea in the world. Like, 'Yeah, let's cross over everything.'"
According to Christiansen, once Kingdom Hearts came out and was successful, Disney's attitude toward video game crossovers did begin to soften, and it became more open to having their characters interact outside of their own respective worlds. This led to several new pitches internally, including the idea for a fighter featuring various Disney characters.
Christiansen said, "Since Kingdom Hearts already kind of broke that mould, producers would say, 'Hey, what if we say they're action figures and we kind of take the same conceit as Toy Story, but have them fight each other instead?' Then, we can have all these action figures of Disney characters from Tarzan, The Lion King, and Treasure Planet, and it can be this Smash Brothers kind of thing. The title of that concept was Disney's Action Figure Face Off."
He continued, "Often, when we were pitching a game at Disney, what they wanted from us was these gigantic presentation boards with art all over it. So you would get these big, six- or eight-foot-long boards that were maybe four feet high, like one-inch-thick foam core, and then over it were all these pieces of artwork printed out with big logos. So it was a big visual impact kind of thing. This was all so that you could walk the executives through the game. This led to things that did come out, like Disney's Extreme Skate Adventure, which was Mary Ann's game."
However, in the case of Action Figure Face Off, the project only made it to the prototype stage before Disney dropped it, wanting to focus on safer titles, such as film and television tie-ins.
"Over my four years at Disney, I worked on so many concepts that never happened," said Christiansen. "I think that if there was a movie or a TV show, I probably carried it through, like Treasure Planet, Atlantis, Peter Pan 2, or Kim Possible — those games got money — or Pixar stuff like Buzz Lightyear and Monsters, Inc. But there was so much discussion about, 'What do we do with all these properties that we have?' So there's a lot of concept stuff for things that made it out.
"Not too long after that, though, you have Disney Infinity, where everything's all mixed together. It felt like a no-brainer to us, but you had to constantly coax people to go along with that."
Looking online for other mentions of Disney's Action Figure Face-Off, there's very little, except for a few references on the LinkedIn profiles of former Activision employees (including the software engineer Peter Walsh and the associate producer Lara Sweeney), suggesting that, much like Extreme Skate Adventure, Activision would have once again been responsible for bringing the project to life.
These profiles, however, seem to disagree on the game's potential platforms, with one source listing PS2 and PC, while another lists PS2, Nintendo GameCube, and Xbox.
Would you have liked to have seen a Disney take on Smash Bros.? Let us know in the comments!