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As you may have seen, I recently interviewed concept artist Ken Christiansen about some unrealised projects he worked on during his four-year tenure at Disney Interactive (from 2000-2004).
Already, as part of a series of articles, we've published stories about a Smash Bros-esque title featuring Disney characters from Activision, a pitch for a Rocketeer video game sequel that sadly went nowhere, and a Pirates of the Caribbean project that was reportedly inspired by Stormfront Studios' licensed Two Towers game. But these aren't the only projects he was happy to talk about.
Speaking to Christiansen, he also informed me of a few other pitches he was involved with at Disney, including failed attempts to get a Nightmare Before Christmas game off the ground, prior to the release of Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogie's Revenge (for PS2 and Xbox) and Nightmare Before Christmas: The Pumpkin King (for the GBA) in the mid-2000s, and its appearance as world in the Kingdom Hearts series.
"We tried to get A Nightmare Before Christmas going, and we could not get it going," said Christiansen. "There were two concepts. There was my concept, but then on the other side, we had this guy, called Chris Takami, who had worked on the Tim Burton Flash animation web-only series Stain Boy, and he was doing a music-based game.
"My idea was basically Jack returned to the forest with all the trees with all the different holidays on them, and they're all opened up. So my idea was to have all these bad guys from the different worlds group up like DC's Legion of Doom. Jack and Sally's kids get kidnapped, so Jack and Sally have to team up, save their kids, and go through all the lands. I did a bunch of character designs, like who's the Jack equivalent, who's the Oogie Boogie equivalent [of each world], and then what kind of gameplay do you kind of want to do."
As Christiansen states, the two ideas were percolating inside Disney, but he was told the higher-ups weren't interested because there was no big film or animated project to tie them to.
"Again, there was no movie to support," he tells me. "There wasn't a big thing, and they couldn't get their heads around it. They kept wanting us to hit home runs, but they would never let us create something new or original. It always had to be tied to something that already existed. And because of that, you never really had enough time to make a great game. You only had 18 months, but it took three months to figure out what game you wanted to do, lock down a developer, and get started, so you really had only 15 months. And you have to be shipped day and date, so the time crunch always ended up being insane."
Even though it was unlikely anything would happen with it, Christiansen kept working on illustrations and ideas for his Nightmare pitch. But then in 2001, Disney redressed Disneyland's Haunted Mansion to feature characters from Nightmare Before Christmas. The incredible response to this event ended up proving to Disney's higher-ups that a game inspired by the film might be worth pursuing, but rather than further developing one of the pre-existing ideas and going from there, Christiansen claims that one of the Disney execs instead ended up signing away the game rights to Capcom out of the blue.
"Someone at Disney was putting together a deal with Capcom to do a Mickey game," Christiansen tells me. "And what this guy liked to do was bundle a greater and a lesser title together. So Capcom wanted Mickey, but to get Mickey, they had to agree to do a Nightmare Before Christmas game. They had their engine that they were just going to apply, and that was it."
The resulting game, The Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogie's Revenge, was released in 2004 in Japan (and a year later in Europe and North America) and has often been compared to Capcom's Devil May Cry series, thanks to its hack-and-slash gameplay. However, despite this link to one of Capcom's more popular creations, it scored somewhat average reviews at launch, with critics like Gamespot writing that "It could have been a great sequel if it were some kind of animated film, and not a game," criticising the "unpleasant camera angles," the "dull, repetitious combat" and annoying "backtracking".
Interestingly, the credits for Oogie's Revenge list Takami as Disney's senior producer on the project, suggesting some of the rhythm-based mechanics in Oogie's Revenge could have been carried over from his earlier "music-based" project. But ultimately, Christiansen's pitch for the story was discarded, with the game instead focusing on Jack returning to Halloweentown to find that Oogie Boogie has been stitched back together and that Sally has been kidnapped.
Given we don't have much beyond a few drawings to show how Christiansen's game was shaping up, it's hard to tell whether we really missed out by getting Oogie's Revenge instead, but the artist understandably remains disappointed with how things panned out, believing the finished game fell short of its true potential.
"I don't know if you've ever played Oogie's Revenge," says Christiansen. "It looks nice, and it's kind of fun, but it's so repetitive. And I want to say it's only like four or five hours long or something like that. So, it ends up being kind of a miserable experience. But it could have been awesome."
We'd love to hear your thoughts. What did you make of Oogie's Revenge? Was it a worthy sequel? Or would you have preferred to see an alternative follow-up to the seasonal classic?