A former Disney Infinity developer has revealed that the California based Disney Interactive were working on a Kingdom Hearts game over 10 years ago.
Justin Fischer, a Disney Interactive veteran, revealed that the studio Wideload Games was working on a Kingdom Hearts game around the same time as the original Disney Infinity. While few details were revealed, the game was set to be a free-to-play project, but it was scrapped early in development.
Fischer, who now works at indie studio Airlock Games, explained that part of the reason behind his shift from AAA to smaller projects is due to the nature of the current games development. “For me, the three last major projects I worked on were free-to-play games, massive content pipelines,” and a lot of these titles never actually saw the light of day.
“Disney Infinity was one, but actually there was, I think I can talk about it now, but we were working on a free-to-play Kingdom Hearts game while I was still at Disney,” Fischer revealed. “It never got announced, released, shown, but it was pretty cool.”
Fischer explains that the decade-old cancelled game was a “free-to-play action RPG” that was sadly killed before it was ready. This would’ve been in development around the same time as Kingdom Hearts 3, but we weren’t told how the game would’ve tied into the larger series narrative, something that every game in the long-running series has done.
“That was my first real cutting [my] teeth in working free-to-play, but then there was Battlefield Mobile and then Multiversus so so much of my professional existence was just hammering out content pipelines, building out content schedules that went two years in the future, building out deployment strategies, release schedules, all of that, and then [kaboom].”
Now, Fischer is working with fellow Multiversus survivor Brock Feldman at Airlock Games on much smaller projects, but ones that won’t be killed years into developing content that will never release.
The team’s first game, What the Stars Forgot, is a retro-style sci-fi management sim with an eldritch horror twist. Currently set for a March 2026 early access release date, the game has recently passed its Kickstarter funding goal prior to release.
As for Kingdom Hearts, Square Enix is still deep in development on the game’s fourth mainline entry with development “proceeding well” alongside Final Fantasy 7 Remake’s upcoming finale. As the first entry in a new saga for the series, the upcoming game is expected to adapt more Disney properties including Star Wars.
