Every now and then, something brings a memory back so vividly that it feels less like remembering and more like stepping through a door.
With Michael Jackson back in the conversation, I found myself thinking about the strange, funny, surreal path that connected my life to his: first as a fan standing near the stage at Wembley Stadium, later as a game designer sitting at Neverland Ranch, talking with him about video games, music, movies, magic, and a project we almost made together.
The first time I saw Michael perform was at Wembley Stadium in the United Kingdom. I knew the head of security there, and he gave me one of those reflective all-access security bibs, the kind that makes people assume you are supposed to be wherever you are standing.
That bib had already given me a ridiculous concert education. I had used it to stand at the side of the stage for famous acts like Madonna, David Bowie, Prince – everyone.
So naturally, I went as close to the stage as I possibly could.
I wanted to watch Michael Jackson perform from the edge of his stage.
What I remember most, though, is not just the performance. It was the effect he had on people.
And honestly? In one very specific way, it was the worst show ever.
Why? Because everyone kept fainting.
As he sang, women in the front row started passing out. Their boyfriends would turn around, spot me in my security bib, and start yelling, “Mister! My girlfriend just fainted! Help me save her, please!” So instead of standing there taking in the concert, I spent a surprising amount of my time carrying sweaty, crushed, passed-out women to the medical crews.
That sounds ridiculous, but it happened. I had seen plenty of great bands, but this was a whole new level: his fans could not remain conscious.
It was the first time I truly understood that Michael Jackson was not just a pop star. He was a force field. People did not just listen to him. They reacted to him physically, emotionally, almost chemically.
He rocked.
Years later, while making Enter the Matrix with the Wachowskis and Warner Bros., I received a call I never expected.
It came from Neverland.
Michael Jackson was apparently a big Matrix fan, and the question was whether there was any possible way he could play the game before it launched.
I had been around the entertainment business long enough by then to understand celebrity requests, studio requests, impossible requests, and “we need this yesterday” requests. But “Michael Jackson wants to play your unreleased Matrix game at Neverland” was in its own category.
So I went.
Neverland was exactly the kind of place that is difficult to describe without sounding like you are making it up. There were rides. There was music. There was a movie theater and an arcade. There were posters on the way toward the theater, as if you were arriving at some private Hollywood dream. There was even a concessions area. It had the feeling of a child’s imagination built at full scale by someone who actually had the resources to do it.
And then, almost immediately after I arrived, Michael handed me a black plastic trash bag.
“Here David, tear a hole in this and wear it.”
I remember thinking, “Huh?”
Then Michael started putting on his own trash bag. One of his staff came in carrying a giant pile of eggs. A bunch of his friends appeared, also wearing the required black trash bags, and suddenly we were all heading outside for an egg fight.
I threw my first egg full force. I have long arms, so it really went.
Then the world seemed to go into slow motion.
I realized the egg was flying directly toward his son’s face. I also noticed they were filming everything for Michael’s home video collection, which meant there would be evidence of exactly who had done it. Great start: arrive at Neverland, make Michael Jackson’s son cry.
Luckily, the egg whizzed past his ear by what felt like millimeters. After that, I switched into “Here, take this” mode and performed the lamest egg throws you have ever seen.
Everyone survived, and I was invited to stay.
That was part of the strange magic of being there. Around Michael, the impossible could suddenly become casual. One moment you are arriving to show him an unreleased video game. The next, you are wearing a trash bag and trying not to accidentally take out one of his kids with an egg.
I had a damn good time in his arcade. I played his arcade machines, rode his rides, and fired up his go-karts while Michael Jackson music played around us, turned all the way up. That sentence alone still feels impossible: you are on an amusement park ride, at Michael Jackson’s home, listening to Michael Jackson music, because Michael Jackson wanted to play your video game.
There were always interesting people there. Marlon Brando was staying there for a while, this was when he was very ill and wanted to escape the media. Brett Ratner was there just hanging out. I was given a kind of free roam that still seems unbelievable when I think back on it.
But what surprised me most was how normal some of the moments felt.
I remember going into his movie theater and seeing Michael with Paris and Prince. They were down on the floor, playing, while The Three Stooges was on. At one point I saw him letting Prince steer his car, I think it was a Rolls-Royce. That was not the public Michael Jackson, or the myth, or the controversy, or the stadium-sized spectacle. It was a father in a private setting, laughing and playing with his kids.
Once, while his chef was cooking me something, Michael walked in and saw that the news was on TV. He asked the chef to turn it off and said something like, “Please turn that off. This is why people come here, to get away from all that!”
That stayed with me.
He was surrounded by the pressures of the real world, but he was also trying very hard to provide an escape, not just for himself, but for everyone around him. Neverland was not subtle. It was not modest. But it was sincere. It was a place built around escape, play, movies, music, magic, and childhood wonder.
I saw other surreal things too. The road might be blocked because they were exercising an elephant. My wife came up one time and fed his bear. I once sat in Michael’s seat in his theater and watched a Marvel movie he had early access to. Again, the details feel ordinary and extraordinary at the same time: a movie theater, a favorite seat, concessions, posters outside, all the familiar rituals of going to the movies, but placed inside Neverland.
As I got to know him a little, I began to understand some of the things he loved. He loved movies. He loved games. He loved magic. He was fascinated by people like David Blaine. I told David Blaine this when I met him after Michael passed.
I made some dumb mistakes too. Michael was completely into magic, so I showed him the Balducci levitation trick. Unfortunately, I got the angles wrong. He did not say it was the lamest magic he had ever seen, but you could tell he was probably thinking it, because then he started talking about David Blaine being a friend of his.
Let’s just say I gave up on the magic.
That curiosity, the hunger for wonder, for the next impossible thing — is what made the video game conversations feel so natural.
After Michael played Enter the Matrix, he invited me back to help him think about a Michael Jackson video game. I brought in my writer friend David Freeman, because I knew David could help structure big emotional ideas into something that could actually work as a story. We began taking meetings at Neverland and exploring what the game could be.
The important thing is that we were not trying to make a vanity project.
The obvious version would have been “Michael Jackson: The Game,” where you play as Michael, dance, perform, maybe fight bad guys with music. But that was not the interesting version. Michael had already done Moonwalker. We wanted something bigger and more surprising.
The concept we explored was a serious, cinematic, third-person action-adventure game. Michael would not be the main character. Instead, he would bring something more powerful: original music, imagination, access to the worlds of film and celebrity, and his unique sense of wonder.
This was right after Enter the Matrix, where we had tried to bring Hollywood and video games closer together by working directly with the Wachowskis and creating new filmed material specifically for the game. That project helped prove that games could sit alongside movies instead of underneath them.
So I started thinking: what would be the next step?
The answer seemed obvious and impossible at the same time.
Bring together the video game industry, the movie industry, and the music industry in one project.
At one point I proposed an idea to Michael that I still love: what if his next album was released exclusively inside the game?
Not as a soundtrack you could buy separately. Not as a promotional tie-in. The game would be the only place you could hear the new Michael Jackson music.
The reason I liked the idea was simple: more people needed to play video games, and he agreed.
At the time, games were already enormous, but there were still millions of people who did not really understand them. They thought games were for someone else, for kids, or teenagers, or “gamers.” But Michael’s audience was global. It crossed generations, countries, and cultures. If the only way to hear his next album was to play a video game, then a huge number of people would play a video game for the first time.
We discussed that his record company would initially freak out, until they heard that a deluxe album would follow the game release.
I remember joking with him, “Can you imagine Oprah Winfrey announcing that if people want to hear your new album, they have to play a video game?”
Michael’s response was perfect.
“I know Oprah!!!.”
That was Michael. A completely wild idea would be floating in the air, and he would respond not with cynicism, but with possibility.
The game itself went through several names and shapes in our documents: The Final War, Solo, The Darkness, and eventually Dark Rim. Looking back through the old folder, I can see the evolution. The early version was a fantasy action-adventure about kingdoms, war, magic, and a hero caught between different versions of the truth. Later, it shifted toward something darker and more psychological: dreams, depression, consciousness, and a hidden realm beyond sleep.
One of the recurring gameplay ideas was remote possession. You might fly over a battlefield through the eyes of an eagle, then transfer your spirit into another character and control them. You might possess an enemy to open a gate, or take over a creature and turn it against its master. The idea was not just to give the player weapons, but to give them powers that changed how they thought about space, identity, and control.
There were gifted children in villages who could teach you unique abilities. There were battles that were not just fights, but wars already in motion when you arrived. There were villains manipulating kingdoms from behind a veil. There were ideas about illusion, sound, magic, and the mind.
It was ambitious. Maybe too ambitious. But that was the point.
Michael gave us freedom at Neverland that I will never forget. We were not sitting in a corporate boardroom trying to sand the edges off an idea until it became safe. We were in a place built by someone who clearly believed imagination should be physical. You could ride it. Watch movies in it. Hear music through it. Walk through it.
That environment affected the thinking.
When you are at Neverland, talking to Michael Jackson about a video game, ordinary ideas feel almost disrespectful. You feel obligated to reach for something bigger.
The sad part is that life took its turn. The project was never completed. It remained an exploration: meetings, documents, concepts, artwork, possibilities. We had never signed an actual contract to publish the game, and I will not be releasing the materials. But the conversations were real, and the idea still feels meaningful to me.
Then, eventually, Michael left this world before we could finish the design.
But the memories stayed.
I remember the feeling that Michael Jackson, underneath all the fame and noise around him, was genuinely interested in wonder. Movies, games, magic, music, he was drawn to things that could transport people.
That is the part I would want people to understand.
The game we almost made was not about putting Michael Jackson on a box. It was about using his imagination, his music, and his reach to invite more people into a new kind of experience.
In a strange way, that idea still feels ahead of its time.
Today, everyone talks about interactive entertainment, transmedia, virtual concerts, cinematic games, and global fandoms moving between music, film, games, and social platforms. But sitting at Neverland in 2003, talking about releasing an album exclusively inside a video game, we were already circling that future.
We just did not get to finish it.
Sometimes the projects that never ship still leave a mark. This one certainly did for me.
It reminded me that the best creative ideas often begin as a slightly insane question:
What if the only way to hear Michael Jackson’s next album was to play a video game?
And for one brief moment at Neverland, that did not sound insane at all.
It sounded possible.
