One of the more random and unexpected parts of the E3 weekend last week was the reveal that Ubisoft was working on an Avatar game, Frontiers of Pandora, based off of James Cameron’s smash hit science fiction movie of the same title. However, this apparently isn’t the first time a game has been tried.
Alongside the official licensed Avatar game that came out alongside the movie, Ubisoft Massive’s David Polfeldt published an autobiography last year that told about a previously ill-fated attempt to find a developer for another licensed game. While the studio is not named, it is, apparently, somewhere in Europe.
The representatives for James Cameron and Ubisoft were all ready to sign a contract as well, but unfortunately first impressions started bad and didn’t get better. Polfeldt described the developers as being a group of broken and desperate-looking people constantly looking over their shoulders, and the final nail in the coffin was the studio head offering the Ubisoft group cocaine.
Any Avatar game that wants to be made has to meet the highly exacting standards of Cameron (infamously a perfectionist on set) and his team, and the studio lost out on the contract as soon as they offered drugs. However, if Cameron and his team have approved of Ubisoft Massive, then hopefully that means the game is going to be good.
A sudden game set in the world of Avatar is likely happening to be in line with the future Avatar franchise, where Cameron has said that at least four more Avatar movies are in various stages of development, with the next slated to come out in 2022, next year.
The search for a developer for the Avatar game apparently took around four years before Cameron and Ubisoft finally settled on Massive, so hopefully when that game releases sometime next year on Playstation 5, Xbox Series X, and PC, the wait will have been entirely worth it.
