If the announcement of Hogwarts Legacy certainly got the Harry Potter saga back to the top of the gaming news, some haven’t always believed in its potential.
In the early 2000s, Harry Potter was the new license to rise: as impatience grew for the release of the fifth volume, The Order of the Phoenix, JK Rowling’s saga was adapted for the big screen by Chris Columbus and Electronic Arts provided the rights on to its versions in video games. For a decade, the American giant will turn any new film into a video game without straying too far from the beaten path. Still, it appears that some at Electronic Arts had different ambitions for the hefty license.
The magic of MMOrt
Interviewed on the Twitch channel The true Brandolorian, Kim Salzer, the publisher’s former product marketing director in the early 2000s, said thatA Harry Potter MMO was canceled by Electronic Arts that didn’t believe in the brand’s long-term potential:
I was so personally involved in this Harry Potter MMO. We did all the research and developed a beta. It was an experience mixing online and offline games as we would have sent gifts directly to the kids at their addresses.
Harry Potter and management restructuring
The concept was original to say the least, but the idea didn’t survive the internal student award ceremony:
We were very confident, but Electronic Arts decided to end the project – I have no better word – because there were internal changes. They didn’t know or didn’t think Harry Potter would last more than a year or two.
We’d worked a lot, but it was mostly really fun doing research with kids, which didn’t happen that often in video games back then.
And what a shame for the gifts. The Harry Potter saga continues to be talked about in other hands as well, as the open world game Hogwarts Legacy is to be talked about again in 2022, a date that the mobile episode Wizards Unite will unfortunately not survive, where the Server will be closed January 31st.
