In 2016, an Epic Mickey Donald Duck-centered spinoff game was officially canceled after the publisher closed its doors. Now footage of the game has leaked online, giving gamers a taste of the Disney duck-based adventure they might have had.
Disney is an otherwise very successful and very powerful company. It owns many television networks, several theme parks throughout the world, and controls more intellectual properties than anyone can easily count. At one point Disney took a crack at the video game medium with its own in-house publishing branch known as Disney Interactive Studios. The publisher is perhaps best known for Disney Infinity as well as the Epic Mickey games which, at one point, were set to have a spinoff game centering around Donald Duck.
Ultimately very little is known about the canceled Donald Duck game. Concept art and gameplay footage are virtually non-existent and most people would be hard-pressed to remember that the game was ever a thing. Today the character is probably best known in gaming spheres for his role in the Kingdom Hearts games as the series' obnoxious mage. Thanks to Slope's Game Room, however, gamers now have an idea of what Donald Duck's solo Epic Mickey spinoff game might have looked like.
Sent to him by an anonymous fan, the footage only shows a few seconds of the game. At first Donald Duck is in what appears to be a treasure room, then walking around a city, and before ending up near a few boats with a partner who appears to be a duck with a Mickey Mouse box on its head. The actual footage of the game starts at the 18:41 mark.
Video games are the one medium that Disney has never quite found its footing in. The developers of the Epic Mickey games, Junction Point ultimately closed in 2013 following the poor sales of the second game, Epic Mickey 2: The Power Of Two. The Donald Duck game, however, wasn't officially canceled until 2016, when Disney Interactive Studios shut its doors as well. These days the company has opted to license its properties out to third-party publishers.
Whether the Donald Duck game itself would have been any good is hard to say. Both of the Epic Mickey games received mixed reviews with the second failing to meet Disney Interactive Studio's expectations. Epic Mickey 2: The Power Of Two was projected to sell over 2 million copies but couldn't even manage to ship 600,000. The evidence that fans have here unfortunately doesn't give any indication that the spinoff game would have been any better.
It is worth noting that the footage on display was more than likely never meant to be shown publicly and doesn't really say anything about the game one way or another. Even the Epic Mickey: Power Of Illusion spinoff game had mixed reception from critics which could show something of a pattern of mediocre developer skills. Sometimes though making a great video game is a combination of good leadership, a properly managed budget, some luck, and a lot of creativity. Perhaps this time around the project may have come together in a more cohesive way. Whether Junction Games could have pulled it off with an Epic Mickey Donald Duck, however, is a question that gamers will sadly never see answered.