This was an abandoned project that was being considered inside Namco in 2004, which was set to feature artwork from the legendary animator Don Bluth, before being rebooted under Blitz Games as Pac-Man World 3 for unknown reasons.
The game is the subject of various Wiki entries online and has even had some of its art shared, both as part of the Savannah College of Art & Design Digital Collection, as well as on Twitter by Bluth himself, but not a whole lot is actually known about the project or how it came to pass (besides an unverified account from someone claiming to have been a playtester on the game).
So, when we saw that Don Bluth was once again sharing some pieces of art from the project earlier this week, we decided to step up and finally find out how Namco came to partner with the creator of films like The Secret of Nimh, The Land Before Time, and An American Tail, and games like Dragon Tale and Space Ace. This led us to reach out to Jeffrey Lujan, a former director of external development at Namco, who claims to be responsible for suggesting Bluth for the project.
Before getting into games, Lujan previously worked in feature film animation at 20th Century Fox, which is where he first met Don Bluth and his colleague Gary Goldman. Here he worked with the two legendary animators on two feature film projects — Anastasia and Titan AE — before leaving animation for business school and eventually landing a job as a senior marketing manager at Namco.
According to Lujan, Pac-Man Adventures wasn't the first project that Bluth worked on for Namco, with the (then) marketing manager previously suggesting Don Bluth Designs contribute cut scene animations for Namco & Argonaut's I-Ninja — a 2003 action video game released for PS2, Gamecube, Xbox, and PC.
Lujan explains, "After I-Ninja, an internal project was started around the Pac-Man universe (an open-world adventure/RPG-style game). While it's probably not appropriate for me to discuss too many details of the initial game design (combined with the fact I may not remember accurately all the intricacies), what I can share is that we wanted to bring new life to Pac-Man and develop who he really was as a character and what his goals/ambitions/history were – specifically, we wanted to develop a deeper, more rich storyline and introduce key new characters and storylines to the Pac Man universe."
As Lujan tells us, there was some discussion about developing the game internally, but around this time, Namco seemed to go under a restructuring process, resulting in the company only having two internal development teams to spare. As a result, the UK developer Blitz Games was brought on board, in the hopes that they would be able to bring Bluth's vision to life.
One of the most interesting rumours about the game we've seen online during our reearch is that it was going to be an edgier take on the Pac-Man series, with some of the concept art that Bluth has shown seemingly depicting a terrorist attack on Pac-Man's village, complete with explosions and a vocal outcry against the hero for not doing enough to prevent the assault. Speaking to Lujan, he claims it was true that Namco was hoping to take it in a slightly darker direction, but clarifies the publisher wasn't going for anything close to an M rating.
From everything Lujan tells us, it sounds like the project was progressing quite nicely, which makes it all the more confusing that development was eventually rebooted. Today, Lujan sadly can't remember the reason it was retooled and appears to debunk the current theory that it was because Namco of Japan's founder Masaya Nakamura didn't agree with Bluth's portrayal of the character.
Instead, he tells us, "This is the funniest question! I worked at Namco for about 5 years and Nakamura-san was the Chairman and excellent to work with (though at that stage, he wasn't really involved in product decisions). It is such a funny question because Namco is extraordinarily protective with their IPs (from Tekken, Ace Combat, Soul Calibur, Tales, etc), I mean extremely challenging to work with. However, with regards to Pac-Man, they were always very welcoming of new ideas to continue to grow the brand and we made some fun games around Pac-Man (Pac-Man World, Pac-Man Rally and even Pac-Man Pinball are a few examples). I found that so unusual given what a historical icon Pac-Man is and how carefully Namco managed their other IPs."
We're currently in the process of reaching out to further members of Namco and Blitz Games, in the hope of potentially getting the definitive reason why the project was abandoned. We'll update this article once we know more.
