Mickey Mouse may be known as an expressly family-friendly figure, but an upcoming horror game is taking a significantly darker route with the character. Subverting children’s media as horror experiences isn’t a new idea at this point, with recent years seeing a major trend of grim re-imaginings. In many cases, these fresh takes can ultimately loop back around to feeling childish in their cheap ploys for attention, but Mickey Mouse is one case where there’s actually some potential to make something interesting out of the material.
Playing around with Mickey Mouse has traditionally been a major no-go for unlicensed media, as Disney has notoriously spent decades leveraging its litigious power to protect the IP of its most central character. Extensions of the United States copyright window have frequently (and infamously) worked out in Disney’s favor, keeping the mouse fully insular for a much longer time than anyone would have anticipated when he was first introduced. With the dawn of 2024, however, the copyright on Mickey’s first adventure Steamboat Willie has finally expired, and some creators were already poised to take advantage of the big shift.
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Infestation 88 Uses Steamboat Willie Mickey For Horror
Infestation 88 was officially announced not long after the new year dawned, and taking a quick look at its marketing material reveals the basic idea of its take on Steamboat Willie. The distinct figure of a black-and-white Mickey in an exaggerated steamboat captain’s hat is twisted into something more nefarious, with a dripping, decaying appearance and a wicked smile. Following up on recent surprise Steam hits like Lethal Company and Phasmophobia, Infestation 88 is a co-op survival horror experience that tasks players with exterminating “twisted versions of classic characters and urban legends.”
Although Infestation 88 is obviously taking advantage of Steamboat Willie‘s new public domain status, the Steam page still seems careful not to poke the hornet’s nest more than necessary. The name Mickey Mouse is never used, and a disclaimer talks about the public domain and lack of any official endorsement. Disney still owns later Mickey Mouse works and designs as well as varying degrees of general trademark protection on the mouse, so anyone who pushes their luck too far with a work trying to capitalize on the shift to public domain could still fall foul of some legislative action.
To Infestation 88‘s credit, it doesn’t seem to be focusing on the basic gimmick of an evil Mickey as the entire conceit. Although the full extent of what characters or myths might appear remains to be seen, one screenshot shows what appears to be a take on the cryptid Mothman, which offers some indication of what direction other threats could go in. Of course, it’s Mickey himself who gets the spotlight in the banner image for the game, and developer Nightmare Forge Games is presumably counting on the character as the main marketing buzz for the title.
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Steamboat Willie’s Mickey Mouse Actually Fits Horror
Although the most common image of Mickey Mouse now might be a blandly chipper figure smiling, waving, and encouraging children, Disney’s mascot started out on a substantially different foot. In Steamboat Willie, Mickey is something of a terror, spending much of the short violently harassing animals for the sake of cartoon gags. His initial sociopathic tendencies play into something like Infestation 88 in a way that makes the project feel more justified than Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey‘s violent take on a consistently charming bear of very little brain, even if the fear factor in the game takes things farther than Walt Disney ever intended.
Steamboat Willie isn’t Mickey’s only outing where he shows an edgier side, and some of the more interesting works have largely sidelined the cheery ideal of the character. Sanding Mickey down to his modern image is partly a product of time, and although Donald Duck quickly took over as the chief agent of mayhem, other early shorts maintain some of Steamboat Willie‘s DNA. Newspaper comics drawn and plotted by Floyd Gottfredson told big adventure stories and noir-style mysteries, and Mickey’s unflagging optimism didn’t overwhelm his keen eye for investigation or ability to hold his own in major conflicts.
Disney itself flirted with a darker Mickey Mouse video game in Epic Mickey, a project helmed by Deus Ex director Warren Spector that tossed the hero (and Disney’s earlier mascot Oswald) into a decaying and corrupted vision of the Magic Kingdom. Early concept art showed that some darker elements didn’t make the final cut, but the kid-friendly product that hit shelves still played with a markedly different atmosphere and tone than most modern Mickey material. The television series of Mickey Mouse shorts that began its run in 2013 is another recent boundary-pushing example, lightly stepping into territory more reminiscent of The Ren & Stimpy Show than Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.
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Infestation 88 Might Not Live Up To Mickey’s Potential
For all the theory about why Mickey Mouse is much better suited for horror than a character like Pooh, it’s not all that likely that Infestation 88 does something especially meaningful with the material. At the end of the day, it’s a mash-up of a recent genre trend and a simple subversion of a public domain character, which seems more like an engineered recipe for attention than the makings of a real passion project. Placing too much faith in a basic payoff of an overplayed joke about a horror version of Mickey Mouse isn’t a great idea, and anyone genuinely interested in Infestation 88 might do best to wait for reviews.
Regardless of Infestation 88‘s ultimate quality, it certainly won’t be the only work that attempts to cash in on the new access to Disney’s iconic character. If “make it horror” has to be the fate of anything that hits public domain, hopefully, something will at least rise to the challenge of doing it in an interesting and valuable way. Infestation 88 might not be as far off from Steamboat Willie as a first glance would suggest, but the best Mickey Mouse horror story might still be the short that first launched the mouse to stardom.
