The Long-Lost Concept Art for Disney’s Canceled Smash Bros Rival Has Finally Resurfaced

Long before crossover fighting games became a genre unto themselves, Disney was already quietly experimenting with the idea of pitting its most beloved characters against each other. That experimentation happened almost entirely behind closed doors, leaving fans with little more than scattered rumors and a handful of leaked details for over a decade.

Those rumors first emerged back in 2013, when outlets like Siliconera and Nintendo Life stumbled across images posted to a former Disney Interactive concept artist’s personal portfolio site. The artist behind that work stayed silent about the project for years afterward, leaving the full scope of what Disney had once considered a mystery largely unknown.

First concept art for Disney and Activision’s canceled Super Smash Bros.-esque fighting game featuring Disney characters has finally resurfaced, according to a report from Time Extension. The drawings, created by former Disney Interactive artist Ken Christiansen, depict Disney characters clashing in battle, including a warrior mouse squaring off against a towering Beast and other action-figure versions of classic characters locked in combat poses.

The project, reportedly called “Disney’s Action Figure Face Off,” was pitched as Disney’s own take on the genre popularized by ‘Super Smash Bros,’ with Activision attached to help bring the concept to life. Christiansen finally opened up about the shelved pitch in a recent interview with Time Extension, explaining the concept’s origins traced directly back to Disney’s cautious relationship with character crossovers before ‘Kingdom Hearts’ proved audiences would actually embrace that kind of mashup.

According to Christiansen, Disney had been deeply hesitant about letting its various animated worlds intersect at all, citing properties like ‘The Lion King’ and ‘The Little Mermaid’ as examples of franchises the studio was reluctant to blend together. He described that resistance as the studio’s biggest hangup at the time, even though the internal creative team pushing for the fighting game concept was fully on board with the idea.

That reluctance ultimately doomed the project before it could move beyond early concept work. Christiansen noted that despite pitching numerous ideas throughout his four years at the studio, very few of his concepts made it past internal discussion, with Disney’s caution around crossover storytelling standing as a recurring obstacle.

The surviving artwork remains the only visual record of what “Disney’s Action Figure Face Off” might have looked like had it actually reached production. Without any surviving gameplay footage, design documents, or further details about which characters were being considered beyond what appears in the drawings, the project remains largely a historical curiosity rather than a fully documented “what could have been.”

Christiansen’s broader career at Disney also touched on other unreleased concepts, including early costume design work for Donald Duck and Goofy tied to the ‘Kingdom Hearts’ franchise, which itself eventually became the successful crossover title that proved Disney’s character-blending fears were largely unfounded.

For fans who’ve spent over a decade piecing together rumors about this shelved fighting game, having Christiansen finally confirm the project’s existence and reasoning offers genuine closure, even if the game itself never made it past the drawing board.

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