Former Disney Interactive concept artist Ken Christiansen confirmed that Kingdom Hearts inspired a Smash Bros.-like crossover fighting game that never got off the ground.
In 2013, Christiansen posted a slew of artworks to his online portfolio, some of which showed rough sketches of various Disney characters facing off in battle. It sparked the idea that Disney had possibly toyed with a crossover fighting game — something that Christiansen has now confirmed.
Speaking with Time Extension in a September 1 interview, Christiansen opened up about the surprising way Kingdom Hearts helped bring the idea to life, though it ultimately never came to fruition. In fact, it was difficult for Kingdom Hearts to get approved in the first place, as Disney execs were hesitant to combine some of the brand’s most iconic properties.
“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 explained. “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.'”
“Since Kingdom Hearts already kind of broke that mold, 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.”
Unfortunately, this game never came to be; Time Extension reports that the project only reached the prototype stage before Disney ditched the idea in favor of movie and TV tie-in games.
With this in mind, the concept art shared to Christiansen’s portfolio makes us even more wistful for this game that never happened. The artwork showed 1v1 battles between eight different characters: Captain Hook vs Beast, the Sheriff of Nottingham vs King Louie, Ursula vs John Silver, and the Queen of Hearts vs the Horned King. Some of these characters are seriously deep cuts (we’d never expect to see the Horned King in any major Disney offering these days, let alone the Sheriff of Nottingham), and it makes us wonder who’d get chosen if such a game were to actually get made in the modern day.
“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,” he continued.
“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.”
Speaking of Disney and games, an extended gameplay trailer for Kingdom Hearts IV was shown at D23 this year, showing off the Land of the Dead from Coco and a closer look at the modern city of Quadratum. KHIV is expected to launch in late 2027, a release window that director Tetsuya Nomura says Square Enix is firmly set on.
Virginia (she/her) is IGN’s News Editor. With ten years of experience reporting on games and entertainment, she’s got a storied background in the fighting game community, influencer news, and viral online trends. Find her on Twitter at @TheeMissGlaze.
