Foodfight!, an infamously horrible CG animated comedy starring product mascots, almost got a tie-in PS2-era video game. And while the tie-in game was never finished, largely because the movie lingered in development hell, we now have access to assets from the Foodfight! game and have a more complete story of what this thing was and how it came to be.
If you’re familiar with Foodfight! it’s likely because it’s often called one of the worst movies ever made. It was planned to release in 2003, but numerous delays, production setbacks, and other problems led to the CG film not seeing the light of day until 2012 via an insurance company. And what we got was a horrendous mess of product mascots—like Mrs. Butterworth and Charlie Tuna—interacting with ugly characters voiced by people like Wayne Brady, Eva Longoria, Hillary Duff, and Charlie Sheen, who plays the main star of the film, a talking dog-human hybrid detective. And, as with many movies from the early 2000s, the plan was to release a tie-in video game alongside the project.
We’ve long known about the existence of this game but not much beyond that. It was only confirmed via a small snippet of gameplay seen in some random E3 2006 B-roll footage, and then it disappeared. That all changed last week thanks to a wonderful blog on Mimeohead about the long-lost Foodfight! game.
According to Ziggy, the writer behind the new blog who spoke to Foodfight! developer Harley Howe, the game was being developed for Wii, PS2, Xbox, and DS. The small studio behind the game, Cat Daddy, started working on the project in 2004. The team put together some playable demos and showed the game off at E3 2006.
But as time went on, it became clear to the devs that the people working on the film were in way over their heads and were unlikely to finish Foodfight! on schedule. So in 2008 Cat Daddy canceled production on the tie-in game and shifted to other projects.
The full story, complete with some wonderful anecdotes about the director of Foodfight! arriving at the studio in a giant fur coat, is worth reading on Mimeohead.
And hey, this all has a happy ending. Foodfight! helped Cat Daddy expand and start working on bigger games. The studio still exists today. Plus Howe was able to share assets from the project online. So while we can’t play the unfinished demos, we can at least dig around the tie-in game’s models, music, and other digital bits like video game archeologists. And I guess, Foodfight! (the movie) was released eventually. Okay, maybe it’s not a complete happy ending.
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