Kingdom Hearts might be beloved by millions of players around the world, but it apparently didn’t have a lasting impact on arguably one of the most important people involved in its creation: former Walt Disney CEO Michael Eisner has admitted he can’t remember why he approved the pitch for Square Enix‘s legendary video game series.
Eisner was appearing in New York at a panel promoting new video game developer Delphi Interactive, of which he’s a major investor. The studio describes itself as the “architect” of IO Interactive‘s 007: First Light, and claims to be leading the return of the FIFA games, having developed FIFA World Cup: Launch Edition on Netflix.
Once the panel was over, Eisner was approached by Stephen Totilo from Game File, who asked if he recalled greenlighting Kingdom Hearts. Eisner initially said no, only recalling the series at all after his memory was jogged with talk of its Tokyo pitch , and its mix of Disney and Final Fantasy characters.
As part of his GameFile report, Totilo also shares an amusing anecdote from Sega COO Shuji Utsumi (translated from this Otoco article), who was working for Disney in Japan at the time, and who’d been tasked with presenting the Kingdom Hearts project for Eisner’s approval
“Kingdom Hearts [was] an experimental project and [hadn’t yet] been authorised by Disney headquarters,” Utsumi explained. “However, I was told shortly after joining the company that Square was unaware of this and was energetically developing the project, which surprised me greatly.”
According to Utsumi, he was advised by some veteran Disney staff in Japan to abandon the project, thinking there was no way it would ever get approved. However, thanks to numerous meetings with his US boss and other team members as well as thorough groundwork, the pitch went smoothly and the rest was history. Eisner apparently didn’t offer “any particular praise”, but rather works of encouragement along the lines of “keep up the good work.”
Kingdom Hearts has, of course, continued long past the conclusion of Eisner’s tenure at the house of the mouse in 2005. In the past 20 years, there’s been a healthy serving of new Kingdom Hearts games across multiple platforms, with the next mainline entry Kingdom Hearts 4 set to release soon.
The series has also suffered its share of cancellations. Most recently, Kingdom Hearts: Missing-Link was canned last year because its development team feared it wouldn’t meet fan expectations. However, leaked footage of its opening appeared online earlier this month, showing what looks to be keyblade-wielding astronauts fighting a giant Heartless. Eisner would be proud, one hopes.
