Partnerships with Hollywood can either be a good or bad thing for gaming, but it’s always great to see iconic movie characters making a debut in games. Rare announced the infamous Captain Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean is the newest non-playable character in the upcoming “A Pirate’s Life” free downloadable content for Sea of Thieves.
This development and partnership with Disney have been a secret for two years according to Joe Neate, the executive producer of Sea of Thieves, in an interview with GameIndustry.biz as reported by Xbox Outsider.
The House of Mouse came to Rare two years ago to talk about the possibility of having “something” in the game. “They came to us and were very complimentary about Sea of Thieves,” said Neate. “They wanted to see if we were interested in doing something with… well, Pirates of the Caribbean was the obvious one, but they have other stuff too. And they left it in our court to go away and have a think about it.”
Pirates of the Caribbean fits perfectly well for a new game content for Rare’s pirate simulation game. Neate also revealed that the Disney movie was also part of their pitch when they presented Sea of Thieves. Neate said: “Our pitch was Pirates of the Caribbean crossed with [The Legend of Zelda] The Wind Waker. The freedom of the pirate life, being the pirate you want to be…”
It’s also worth noting that Rare did an amazing job preventing any sort of leaks about the DLC, unlike most publishers and studios. Neate revealed that they have changed how they shared information internally by only sending out PDFs about what the individual teams are tasked to do. They also went on to codename every single piece of information, plus they avoided including any sort of picture or image related to the IP. He also said that they have changed their internal testing; instead of going through the Insider program, they decided to run a separate process.
Sea of Thieves is available on PC and Xbox, it’s also included in Xbox Game Pass. Plus, A Pirate’s Life is now available for free.