Harry Potter and the Game Ruined by EA

EA turned out to have missed a huge opportunity, now that it is revealed that an undoubtedly wildly popular Harry Potter game was in the works.

There are only a few popular fan franchise franchises that would literally lend themselves perfectly to a video game. We are talking about The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and of course Harry Potter. Yet JK Rowling’s iconic series has received too little game attention to date. That now turns out to be done single-handedly by Electronic Arts. The already controversial publisher managed to screw it up in retrospect.

Harry Potter game EA

During a interview With Twitch streamer TheRealBrandolorian, a former EA employee reveals an unprecedentedly disappointing fact. There was in fact somewhere between 2000 and 2003 a real Harry Potter MMO in the pipeline. Think of World of Warcraft, but within the Harry Potter universe.

EA’s marketing department had conducted extensive research into the possibilities for a Harry Potter MMO. All the lights were green until Electronic Arts scrapped the project. In retrospect, the reasoning is incredibly hilarious: EA thought the Harry Potter franchise would have an expiration date of several years.

For context, between 2000 and 2003, Harry Potter was slowly astonishing mainstream moviegoers with magic. The first film came out in 2001, with the popular sequel a year later. The books were already quite popular before that.

Still, EA didn’t believe that the franchise would remain popular or that it wouldn’t turn into a best-selling game. Now, ten years after the last feature film, there’s a spin-off movie franchise, a TV series in the works, a Pokémon GO-style game, a puzzle game and much more Harry Potter-related entertainment. In short, a huge missed opportunity. Fortunately, an alternative is on the way, even if it’s not an MMO.