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While not a tremendous success at the box office upon its original release, Disney's 1991 film adaptation of The Rocketeer comics by Dave Stevens has gone on to generate a respectable cult following in the decades since.
So, when the news emerged in 2013 that Disney was at one point considering creating a video game sequel following on the film of the same name in the early 2000s, there was inevitably a lot of curiosity about the project, and more importantly, if it actually got any further than a pitch and a few very nice illustrations.
The former Disney Interactive concept artist Ken Christiansen, whose portfolio kicked off the initial rush of news stories, has remained fairly quiet on the topic over the past decade or so, typically turning down interviews about his work. Recently, though, he agreed to fill Time Extension in on how the pitch (yes, pitch!) came to be, during a chat about his work in the video game space.
Speaking to us about The Rocketeer game idea, he said that it came about through a company-wide pitching competition inside Disney Interactive, modelled after a famous American TV show called The Gong Show.
If you're unfamiliar, The Gong Show was a popular game show from the 1970s where people performed "talents" to a panel of judges who would strike a gong to signal when they were tired of a performer and wanted to move on to the next act, with the same applying here to any pitches that had simply gone on too long, or were failing to hold the judge's attention.
"The concept was we have all this talent," said Christiansen, "So instead of them pitching within their groups where it might live or die with their bosses, we'll do a company-wide thing. So you would get up there and pitch your pitch, and we'd have a winner, as well as a second and third place. It was kind of unfair, though, because that was my main focus: creating concepts. And I was also an artist. So I would have these pretty awesome presentations compared to someone from QA, who would come up and maybe do a PowerPoint. So, there was a game called The Guardians, there was a game called Warheads, and then I also pitched a Rocketeer game because I was a big Rocketeer fan."
For The Rocketeer, specifically, the idea was to combine the aerial combat of something like LucasArts' World War 2 flight sim Secret Weapons Over Normandy with the vehicle-stealing mechanic from Grand Theft Auto III, which at the time was one of the biggest games on the market.
"There was a World War II aeroplane game from LucasArts that would have probably come out around 2002," said Christiansen. "It was a really fun game. You're an ally, so you have access to English and American planes, P-51s and all that kind of stuff, and then you're fighting — not the Nazis — because they don't want to put that symbol in the game, but the German crosses. So the conceit was let's take something like the engine of this aerial fighting game, and mix it with Grand Theft Auto. So you're the Rocketeer: you can fly up to a plane, open the canopy, pull a guy out, jump in, and then fly it yourself.
"It would have been a quasisequel to the movie," he continued, "Because the movie is before World War II, and I want to say this would have dovetailed into actual World War II and the US involvement. Cliff is recruited by the government; he's the only guy that can use this rocket pack, and so they've sent him up. Meanwhile, the Germans have been developing rocket technology, and they're applying that to their planes. Now they have jets, and we're still working with propellers."
The reaction to the pitch, according to Christiansen, was enthusiastic, but as he recalls, Disney felt it would require too much investment and lacked a solid marketing hook, like a new film or a TV series to tie it in with. As a result, the pitch never really went anywhere beyond the initial competition, with no one willing to foot the bill to develop it any further.
Christiansen said, "I remember saying to them, 'You're still putting this out on DVD; there's still money to be made. This is a known property, a brand-new, ground-up kind of game that's taking elements from GTA and applying them.' But it was too much work, I think.
"I even put a little plaque on the presentation boards like, 'Why didn't The Rocketeer do very well at the box office?' And I explained to them, because it came out against this film and this film, and it just got buried. But they just didn't want to build it. They wanted a developer who already had an engine they could just art-slap some stuff into. That was kind of the model for Disney back then."
Because of this, Rocketeer fans today wanting to play an official game based on their favourite film still have to make do with the SNES, DOS, and NES games from the early '90s — none of which have proven particularly popular over the years.