THE MAKING OF: MAUI MALLARD
CRAIG ALLEN
Craig worked as an associate producer on Maui Mallard.
JOHN FIORITO
Lead artist duties on Maui Mallard were carried out by John.
PATRICK GILMORE
» Patrick worked as the senior producer on Maui Mallard.
Disney is not a company that kills the goose that lays the golden eggs and nowadays, many of the studio’s projects from the past are gaining sequels and remakes. But once upon a time, Disney itself clipped the wings of a specific mallard, depriving US Genesis owners of a potential blockbuster in the process.
When Aladdin launched on Sega’s 16-bit console in late 1993, its incredible sales exceeded all expectations. Realising that games can be a very profitable business, Disney decided to take matters into its own hands. This is how Disney Interactive was born, the company’s first in-house game studio.
And the first brainchild of the newly minted studio was a quack detective called Maui Mallard, the spitting image of Donald Duck. “Maui was born out of a desire to create something bold with Disney characters, in a way that only Disney could,” recalls senior producer Patrick Gilmore. “The idea was to take a classic character and create an all-new adventure, not just tap into nostalgia or milk past classics. We would build the game internally, with the first videogame team ever formed inside of Disney.”
The original game was created for Mega Drive (Genesis in the States) and was conceived as the successor to . “One of the first games I worked on at Disney was ,” continues Patrick. “‘Quackshot, of course, is a play on the adventure magazines of the same era as . So ‘Crack Detective’ became ‘Quack Detective’, and since Donald as a gumshoe was less interesting than Indiana Jones, we soon had him in a Hawaiian shirt in a kind of Magnum PI role, which seemed a much better fit.”
