Industry veteran David Perry has told NowGamer that the project he worked on with Michael Jackson was designed to attract millions of music fans to the video games industry

The King of Pop enjoyed a long association with video games, working in particular with Sega, but following Jackson's death, developer and industry consultant Perry confirmed that they had collaborated on a potentially revolutionary project together.

“Our goal was, very clearly, to grow the games industry,” Perry told NowGamer. “We were very interested in how we could get millions of Michael Jackson fans to play their first video game. And how can we do that without hurting album sales?”

“He agreed to do the music for the game, and then we would take the music and release it as an album later. There was no issue with the record company; they would’ve added new songs to it to make it special as an album, and it would have been a game too.”

The game/album crossover would have been one of the first combinations of it’s kind, and a potential precursor to the way we now consume music through games such as Guitar Hero and Sing Star.
 
“We worked it out as we’d release the music in the game, all the fans would hear about it and go ‘I’ve got to play this game – what is this game?’ and hopefully get people to try it, added Perry. “The design he wanted to do was actually about two different worlds – the real world, which was oppressed, and a [fantasy] world in which you were free and could be a superhero and do all types of cool stuff.”

The project was shelved when Jackson became caught up in abuse allegations. Of the recently rumoured new Michael Jackson game, Perry said: “I’ve heard about this new game and I’m worried about it because it sounds like it’s just a licensing deal, where they license Michael Jackson’s old songs like Thriller and just put it in a game. That’s not what we were talking about.”