We Almost Got a ‘Naked Gun’ Video Game Starring Leslie Nielsen, Until O.J. Ruined It

Imagine booting up your PlayStation in 1997 and, instead of another gritty space marine,
you’re controlling Lt. Frank Drebin as he accidentally solves crimes, faceplants through
every crime-scene, and probably deletes your memory card by sitting on it. That almost
happened. For a brief, glorious moment in the late ’90s, a Naked Gun video game
starring Leslie Nielsen was actually in development until real-life scandal turned the
franchise into brand napalm and quietly killed the project.

The story sounds like a gag the Zucker–Abrahams–Zucker team would write: a British studio
gets the license for a beloved American slapstick franchise, crafts an ambitious parody-filled
adventure, lines up Leslie Nielsen himself… and then the cultural fallout from the O.J. Simpson
cases blows the whole thing to pieces. It’s part forgotten gaming history, part cautionary tale
about how messy pop culture gets when comedy, celebrity, and crime collide.

The Perfect Time for a Naked Gun Video Game

To understand why a Naked Gun game made so much sense, you have to remember what the
mid-’90s looked like. Licensed games were everywhere. If a movie, cartoon, or sketch comedy
show existed, someone tried to turn it into a video game often with wildly mixed results.
Comedy brands like Wayne’s World, Beavis and Butt-Head, and later
South Park all made the jump from screen to console, even when the gameplay mostly
consisted of “walk right and suffer.” Tie-ins were risky, but they were also dependable
marketing machines for Hollywood studios and game publishers.

By that point, the Naked Gun franchise was a proven hit. The original TV series
Police Squad! had evolved into a trilogy of movies headlined by Leslie Nielsen as
the terminally serious but catastrophically clumsy Frank Drebin, mixing deadpan performances
with rapid-fire sight gags and wordplay. The films were box-office successes and had
the kind of instantly quotable lines that practically begged to be turned into interactive
set pieces.¹

Slapstick parody plus point-and-click puzzle solving? On paper, that’s a perfect combo.
And a small UK studio called Perfect Entertainment was convinced they could make it work.

Perfect Entertainment Gets the Case

Perfect Entertainment was best known for its Discworld adventure games dense,
jokey point-and-click titles adapted from Terry Pratchett’s novels. Those games leaned hard
into wordplay, visual gags, and genre parody, which made the studio a surprisingly natural
fit for something as chaotic as Naked Gun.²

After finishing Discworld II and gearing up for Discworld Noir, co-founder
Gregg Barnett went hunting for a new property that might resonate with American players the
way Discworld had in the UK. His choice: The Naked Gun. The studio secured
the rights and started planning not just one, but two games the first
slated for a 1997 release, with a follow-up envisioned for 1998 or 1999 on PC, Mac, PlayStation,
and Sega Saturn.²

The idea was to build a full-blown 2D point-and-click adventure that felt like stepping into
one of the movies, complete with parody, absurd puzzles, and a script packed with the kind of
jokes that reward you for clicking on absolutely everything in the background.

A Point-and-Click Spoof Worthy of Frank Drebin

Barnett has described the design as the best he ever wrote a chance to go “crazy” parodying
movies of that era and riffing on pop culture at large.^2,3 The plot would have borrowed
from the mind-control storyline in the first film, where villain Vincent Ludwig uses a brainwashing
device to turn unsuspecting victims into assassins. That framework gave the team an excuse to drop
Frank into increasingly ridiculous scenarios while still technically “solving” a case.

The opening sequence was especially ambitious: a 3D-rendered FMV intro styled like the classic
credits of the films, with the police car racing through bizarre settings. Only this time, it
was literally crashing through other video games think the squad car barreling through
Doom, Super Mario, and other recognizable worlds in a meta-joke about crossover
culture years before everything became a cinematic universe.^2,3

The working titles were pure Zucker-style wordplay: ideas like
Naked Gun: 3½ (with 5¼ Scratched Out) a floppy-disk joke for the PC
crowd and Naked Gun: Forever Hold Your Piece, complete with concept art
of Leslie Nielsen in a bridal veil holding a gun like a bouquet.^2,3 It wasn’t just a movie
tie-in; it was designed as a full parody of games, movies, and marketing trends all at once.

Barnett also recalled hyper-slapstick set pieces that felt tailor-made for the franchise. In one gag,
Frank accidentally kills the Loch Ness Monster, the Yeti, and the first alien contact without ever
noticing what he’s done. Another puzzle involved Frank getting kidnapped, blindfolded, and beaten
“Batman-style,” complete with onomatopoeic “BIFFs” and “BANGs” filling the screen. When the cops later
reenact the event at the station, they blindfold him again… except the player can now see that the
“attackers” are just Frank’s own coworkers enthusiastically pummeling him in the name of detective work.^2,3

Yes, Leslie Nielsen Was Supposed to Star

This wasn’t some loose, off-brand adaptation with sound-alikes and generic cop jokes. Perfect
Entertainment reached out through agents and managed to line up Leslie Nielsen
himself to be involved in the project. According to Barnett, Nielsen was on board, and early
conversations had started about bringing in Priscilla Presley as well, continuing her role as
Jane Spencer from the films.²

It’s hard to overstate how important that casting was. Nielsen’s entire appeal in
Naked Gun comes from the contrast between his serious, old-school leading-man presence
and the utter stupidity of everything happening around him. Translating that to a video game
with deadpan line reads, ridiculous inventory puzzles, and maybe even a few fake “serious” cutscenes
could have given the game exactly the tonal anchor it needed.

In other words, this wasn’t a shovelware tie-in slapping the logo on a random shooter. It was shaping
up to be a proper comedy adventure, built around the same performance that made the movies classics.
And then real life kicked the door in.

Enter O.J. Simpson. Exit the Game.

One of the key supporting characters in the original Naked Gun films is Detective
Nordberg, played by O.J. Simpson. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, Simpson was a former NFL
superstar and TV personality a familiar, likable face who added physical comedy to the films’
slapstick set pieces.^1,4,5

That image shattered in 1994, when Simpson was arrested and later tried for the murders of
Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. The highly publicized criminal trial ended in acquittal
in 1995, but the story didn’t stop there. In 1997, during the period when the game was in
development, Simpson was found liable for the wrongful deaths in a civil lawsuit brought by
the Goldman family, keeping his name and the gruesome details of the case constantly in the
news cycle.^2,4

From a licensing perspective, that was catastrophic. As Barnett later put it, O.J. was one of
the three main actors associated with the Naked Gun films, and once his legal troubles
dominated headlines, the franchise’s name “went a bit dodgy.” The O.J. saga was “a big thing in
America,” and the association was enough to kill enthusiasm for a comedy game that might suddenly
look tasteless, no matter how careful the script was.^2,3

Eventually, Perfect Entertainment lost the Naked Gun license altogether. The team tried
to salvage the design by retooling it as an original game called The Big Kahuna,
stripping out the film-specific characters but keeping the core puzzles and parody. That project
also collapsed amid legal and financial trouble with their publisher, and the studio itself shut
down in 1999. The dream of a proper Frank Drebin game vanished along with it.²

The Naked Gun Game We Actually Got

The idea of a Naked Gun game didn’t disappear completely. In 2011–2012, Paramount and
Gamecentric Media released The Naked Gun: I.C.U.P., a downloadable point-and-click
adventure for iOS, Android, and PC. Instead of Frank Drebin, the game followed his son,
Frank Drebin Jr., riffing on modern crime dramas and video-game tropes through episodic cases.^1,6,7

The game leaned into the franchise’s parody DNA, but it had to do so without Leslie Nielsen, who
died in 2010. Voice actor A.J. LoCascio stepped in as Drebin Jr., and the result was a kind of
spiritual successor part homage, part reboot. Reviews were mixed, landing around the middle of
the scale on aggregate sites; critics liked the faithful tone and jokes but weren’t blown away
by the mechanics.^6,7

In a surreal twist, the one character from the movie trilogy who did show up in the mobile game
was Nordberg yes, the role played in the films by O.J. Simpson. It’s a reminder
of just how complicated the franchise’s relationship with that character has become. Depending on
when you look at the timeline, Nordberg is either a key comedy sidekick, a PR nightmare, or a
weird cameo nobody’s quite sure what to do with anymore.³

Naked Gun, O.J., and the Awkwardness of Nostalgia

That awkwardness didn’t end with the lost ’90s game. When Paramount finally moved forward with a
new Naked Gun movie the 2025 legacy sequel starring Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin Jr.
the filmmakers openly discussed how carefully they had to handle O.J. Simpson references. Director
Akiva Schaffer has mentioned limiting the reboot to a single O.J. joke, treating it as an unavoidable
“elephant in the room” rather than a running gag.^8,9

Original co-creator David Zucker has also talked about how the shadow of Simpson’s later life
complicates the way audiences revisit the films. For some, Nordberg is still part of the nostalgic
package the pratfalls, the hospital gags, the physical comedy. For others, his presence is a
jarring reminder of one of the most infamous celebrity crime stories of the 20th century, and that
tension inevitably bleeds into how studios make decisions about reboots, merch, and yes, video games.^5,9,10

The canceled Perfect Entertainment game sits right at that intersection. It wasn’t “about” O.J.
Simpson, but his role in the trilogy made him impossible to ignore. Once his name became synonymous
with real-world tragedy, the idea of a silly slapstick game plastered with Naked Gun
branding became too risky for licensors to touch.

What the Lost Game Tells Us About Licensed Comedy

There’s something oddly poignant about this particular canceled project. Licensed games get
scrapped all the time for boring reasons budgets, tech issues, publisher mergers but here,
the failure was driven by a cultural earthquake far outside the control of designers or fans.

The almost–Naked Gun game is also a snapshot of a specific era in comedy and gaming.
This was a time when:

• Point-and-click adventures were still viable on consoles, not just PCs.
• Studios were comfortable letting small outside teams play with big film licenses.
• Parody could still be gleefully broad, dunking on other games and movies without worrying about
  cross-licensing or cinematic universe politics.

In a modern context, a similar project would probably be a carefully PR-filtered cross-media
“experience,” with legal notes stapled to every joke. In the late ’90s, it was just a handful of
developers with an IP, a design document, and the hope that audiences would want to click their
way through a mess of gags and disaster-prone police work.

The tragedy is that we never got to see if their instincts were right. Instead, the design doc
is reportedly sitting in a drawer somewhere, and the game survives only through interviews,
magazine mentions, and a Cracked dot com headline that sounds like a punchline but is
depressingly literal.

Experiences: Imagining Life With a 1990s Naked Gun Game

So what would it have actually felt like if that Naked Gun video game
launched in 1997 as planned? To picture it, you almost have to mentally time-travel back to the
era of demo discs, dial-up internet, and game magazines stacked like unstable Jenga towers next
to your CRT television.

You’d probably first hear about the game in a tiny preview box in some monthly magazine
one screenshot, maybe a piece of concept art of Leslie Nielsen in that bridal veil, and a short
paragraph promising “classic slapstick and all-new gags.” You’d read it three times anyway,
because there weren’t infinite trailers spamming your feeds yet. A single screenshot of Frank
Drebin clicking through a crime scene would be enough to fuel months of speculation on message
boards and playgrounds.

The game itself would likely have lived on the same shelf as other oddball ’90s adventures:
quirky PC titles, comedy-heavy point-and-click games, maybe a few imports. You’d boot it up,
sit through that FMV intro of the police car plowing through other game worlds, and immediately
realize this wasn’t the usual “movie game” cash-grab. This was closer to a playable parody
special something you’d show to friends just to make them watch the opening cutscene.

If you were a Discworld fan, you’d recognize the design DNA right away: dense screens,
conversational jokes, inventory items that seem useless until they become the stupidly perfect
solution to a puzzle. You’d probably get stuck on that “reenactment” segment the one where Frank
is beaten up twice and then brag about figuring it out weeks later by clicking on some absurdly
minor background detail. Half the joy would be in discovering jokes that had nothing to do with
progress, just because you decided to look at a fire extinguisher or interrogate a potted plant.

Years later, you’d think back on it the same way people remember cult adventure games today:
maybe a little clunky, maybe overloaded with bad puns, but strangely irreplaceable. You’d quote
a couple of favorite lines with friends, complain that nobody makes games like that anymore,
and probably spend at least one late night searching YouTube for someone’s long-play just to
prove you didn’t imagine it.

Instead, what we have is the ghost of that experience a list of ideas in an interview, a handful
of remembered jokes, and screenshots that never materialized. We know there might have been a scene
where Frank accidentally wipes out cryptids and first contact in one go; we know there was a floppy
disk pun baked into the title. We can reconstruct bits and pieces in our heads, but we’ll never
quite know how the whole thing would have played.

That’s part of what makes this story so compelling. It isn’t just that a licensed game got canceled.
It’s that we almost had a rare combination: a beloved comedy franchise, its original star, a studio
that understood adventure-game humor, and a design that leaned fully into parody instead of treating
the license like a sticker on the box. In a timeline where the O.J. saga didn’t torpedo the brand,
Naked Gun: 3½ might be sitting alongside Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle
on “remember when?” lists.

Instead, it lives in that strange corner of pop culture where almost-classics reside: the things we
talk about not because we played them, but because we nearly did. The headline sounds like a joke
“We Almost Got a ‘Naked Gun’ Video Game Starring Leslie Nielsen, Until O.J. Ruined It” but behind
the punchline is a genuine sense of loss for a game that had all the right pieces, and got taken off
the board anyway.

Conclusion

The canceled Naked Gun game is a reminder that pop culture doesn’t live in a vacuum. Games,
movies, and TV shows are tied to real people with real reputations, and when those reputations implode,
the fallout is bigger than a news cycle. A clever design document, a studio’s ambitions, even a chance
for fans to finally control Frank Drebin all of that can vanish because a franchise suddenly means
something very different than it did when the ink first dried on the license.

We did eventually get a Naked Gun game, and we’ve now entered the era of reboots and legacy
sequels trying to figure out how to celebrate the original while acknowledging the uncomfortable parts
of its history. But the version that would have let Leslie Nielsen himself stumble across your screen,
pointing and clicking his way through parodies of ’90s pop culture? That one lives only in interviews,
in fan speculation and in the alternate universe where Frank Drebin actually made it to the PlayStation.