As you may have already seen, we at Time Extension recently went to the effort of reaching out to a bunch of ex-Disney employees to try and find out more about the history of Capcom’s excellent SNES platformer The Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse.
Speaking to the former Disney vice president and general manager of Disney Software Shelley Miles, and ex-Disney producer Noah Dudley, we inevitably heard a ton of cool insights into how the company’s relationship with Capcom started and the events that led to the 16-bit platformer. But what we neglected to mention was that we also chatted about some other topics too. This included some of the games that Sega made using Disney’s licenses.
One story, in particular, for instance, that kept coming up when speaking to former Disney staff was an anecdote about a game, where Sega had to change parts of the game to avoid presenting Donald as unnecessarily cruel to animals.
“There was [one] game we were doing with Sega that we had to change a lot of it,” Miles told us. “I don’t remember much except they were clubbing seals. We were reviewing it and we were going, ‘What?!’ It was like, ‘No, no, no, we can’t do that.”
As mentioned, Miles wasn’t the only one who brought this up, with Dudley also telling a similar but different story.
“This poor producer showed us a videotape of Donald Duck walking across the ice,” said Dudley. “And every once in a while a walrus would pop up out of the ice and his job would be to smash it with a hammer and if he did that, then the walrus fell and he was gone. This was not considered quite the Disney thing.”
We even heard the same story again from Roger Hector too, who was the former director of product development at Disney Sofware, this time mentioning seals again instead of the Walruses Dudley described. “Because of my gaming experience, I was casually asked to review and comment on their games in development,” Hector told us. “This included rejecting some game elements like Donald Duck clubbing baby seals for points!”
Speaking to Hector, we were able to identify the game they were talking about as Lucky Dime Starring Donald Duck and were able to work out specifically what they were referring to. In the South Pole section of the game, players will be met with a bunch of yeti-like creatures in the finished game that slide across the ice that Donald can wallop with his wooden mallet. According to those we spoke to, it seems like these characters were originally meant to be baby seals, with Sega’s Japanese development team not exactly putting much thought into how this might be perceived inside Disney’s corporate culture.
Looking deeper into the subject, this doesn’t seem to be the only instance of an animal being swapped out for another creature either during development. As the preservationist group TCRF notes on their website an early prototype of the Master System game originally featured frogs in the Great American Forest level instead of snakes and also had an owl as an enemy instead of the more vicious-looking bird that appears in the final version.
In the Northern Woods level, meanwhile, it was once possible to jump and kill the beavers that appear there, whereas, in the final version, the beaver’s tail is all that can be seen and will harm Donald if he tries to get closer.
It’s interesting all these years later to hear these kinds of stories, as it shows a level of thought to the enemy designs that we never really considered growing up when we first played the game. We don’t know about you, but we secretly have our fingers crossed that more prototypes get released in the future, so that we can see this slightly more sadistic take on Donald for ourselves.
Go on.... treat yourself to a new game.
