Michael Jackson was once in talks with Enter the Matrix and Earthworm Jim studio Shiny Entertainment to make a video game together, it’s been revealed.
In a new article on his blog (as spotted by Time Extension), Shiny Entertainment founder David Perry said he first met Jackson while the studio was working on Enter the Matrix.
Perry received a call from Jackson’s Neverland Ranch, explaining that he was a huge fan of The Matrix and was wondering if it was possible for him to play Enter the Matrix before it was released.
According to Perry, he travelled to the Ranch to show Jackson the game, during which an impromptu egg fight broke out and he nearly hit Jackson’s son in the face with an egg.
After this meeting, Jackson reportedly invited Perry and writer David Freeman to the Ranch to come up with a new idea for a video game, which Perry says was not intended to be “a vanity project”.
“The obvious version would have been Michael Jackson: The Game, where you play as Michael, dance, perform, maybe fight bad guys with music,” he recalled. “But that was not the interesting version. Michael had already done Moonwalker. We wanted something bigger and more surprising.”
Instead, the trio came up with a “serious, cinematic, third-person action-adventure game” where Jackson would not be the main character, but would instead offer “original music, imagination, access to the worlds of film and celebrity, and his unique sense of wonder”.
Perry said the game had a number of working titles, the last of which was Dark Rim. Although he hasn’t shared images from his folder of documents, he said the game started off as “a fantasy action-adventure about kingdoms, war, magic, and a hero caught between different versions of the truth”, before evolving into “something darker and more psychological – dreams, depression, consciousness, and a hidden realm beyond sleep.”
“One of the recurring gameplay ideas was remote possession,” he explained. “You might fly over a battlefield through the eyes of an eagle, then transfer your 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. 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.
“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.”
The plan was also to have Jackson create an entirely new album’s worth of music and make it exclusive to the game, in an attempt to encourage more of his fans to play video games for the first time.
“At the time, games were already enormous, but there were still millions of people who did not really understand them,” he recalled. “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.”
Perry says the game was never released because “life took its turn”. Although he doesn’t specify exactly what this means, the release of Enter the Matrix in May 2003 came just three months after journalist Martin Bashir’s controversial documentary Living with Michael Jackson, and seven months before Jackson was charged with seven counts of child molestation (of which he was acquitted in 2005).
“Sometimes the projects that never ship still leave a mark,” Perry concluded. “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. It sounded possible.”
