Michael Jackson was almost convinced to release an album that could only be listened to on a video game. The project would have seen Jackson’s music released on video game consoles in a pitch to members of the public to get them more involved in gaming. The Bad hitmaker seemed to be a fan of video games and was set on helping out the industry in the mid-2000s, but the plan was eventually passed up.
David Perry, the man who worked on the team that pitched Jackson the project, explained what the process would have looked like and why Jackson was initially on board with the plan. He wrote: “The concept we explored was a serious, cinematic, third-person action-adventure game. Michael would not be the main character. Instead, he would bring something more powerful: original music, imagination, access to the worlds of film and celebrity, and his unique sense of wonder.
“This was right after Enter the Matrix, where we had tried to bring Hollywood and video games closer together by working directly with the Wachowskis and creating new filmed material specifically for the game. That project helped prove that games could sit alongside movies instead of underneath them.
“So I started thinking: what would be the next step? The answer seemed obvious and impossible at the same time. Bring together the video game industry, the movie industry, and the music industry in one project. At one point I proposed an idea to Michael that I still love: what if his next album was released exclusively inside the game?
“Not as a soundtrack you could buy separately. Not as a promotional tie-in. The game would be the only place you could hear the new Michael Jackson music. The reason I liked the idea was simple: more people needed to play video games, and he agreed.”
The pair had even discussed what they would do when the record label most likely rejected the proposal outright. Perry added: “We discussed that his record company would initially freak out, until they heard that a deluxe album would follow the game release.”
Despite being confident in dealing with the record label’s pushback, the project never came to be as Jackson would die in 2008, three years after the project was first discussed. Perry recalled: “The sad part is that life took its turn. The project was never completed. It remained an exploration: meetings, documents, concepts, artwork, possibilities. We had never signed an actual contract to publish the game, and I will not be releasing the materials. But the conversations were real, and the idea still feels meaningful to me. Then, eventually, Michael left this world before we could finish the design.
“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.”
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