Pure (2008) for Windows XP is one of Disney’s most expensive video game misfires
Pure (2008) for Windows XP is one of Disney’s most expensive video game misfires
Did you know Disney once published an ATV racing game? Yeah—Disney. The same company that gives us princesses and endless Marvel spinoffs was, for a brief and shiny moment, trying to be a serious video game publisher.
Fox tried it. Warner Bros. tried it. Disney thought it could too. But in the end? They couldn’t make a dent.
Pure was their big swing. Developed by Black Rock Studio in Brighton—the same crew that created the original MotoGP games and ATV Offroad Fury—it had pedigree.
And Disney didn’t skimp: a marketing budget north of $10 million, slick demos that wowed the press, and even a Best Racing Game of E3 2008 award to hang on the wall. Critics loved it. 8s and 9s across the board. PC Gamer US gave it 82%. On paper, this thing should’ve been massive.
But when it hit shelves in September 2008—across Xbox 360, PS3, and yes, Windows XP—it sputtered. No one knows the exact number, because Disney never bragged about it, but the best estimates hover around 300,000 copies sold worldwide. For a cross-platform release with that kind of push, that’s a commercial faceplant.
A game that gave you giant canyon jumps, a deep trick system, even LAN play on PC—it still managed to vanish almost instantly. Black Rock followed it with Split/Second, which also flopped, and then Disney pulled the plug. By 2011 the studio was gone, and by 2016 Disney Interactive itself stopped publishing games altogether.
So Pure lives on as a weird artifact. A critically adored racer from the Mouse House’s short-lived experiment in being a “real” publisher. A game that should’ve soared, but barely left the runway.
Shame though, because Pure and Split/Second were great games.