|
Spoiler
non ho il wii
non so cosa sia(bhè oddio, un gioco ambientato in una disneyworld dark/steampunk mi par di capire)
ma sembra una figata pazzesca
<img src="http://i27.tinypic.c...om/11bltmf.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
<img src="http://i30.tinypic.c...com/fknthh.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
<img src="http://i31.tinypic.c...om/2e3u34x.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
<img src="http://i30.tinypic.c...com/zocg1g.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
<img src="http://i27.tinypic.c...om/15drodt.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
altre immagini e info, qua:
<a href="http://community.liv.../37694738.html" target="_blank">http://community.liv...694738.html</a>
<a href="http://www.eurogamer...mickey-for-wii" target="_blank">http://www.eurogamer...key-for-wii</a>
purtroppo il progetto sembra ancora a livello di sole concept art, però minchia... <img src="https://forum.everye...DIR#>/ohmy.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="" border="0" alt="ohmy.gif" />
non ho il wii
non so cosa sia(bhè oddio, un gioco ambientato in una disneyworld dark/steampunk mi par di capire)
ma sembra una figata pazzesca
<img src="http://i27.tinypic.c...om/11bltmf.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
<img src="http://i30.tinypic.c...com/fknthh.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
<img src="http://i31.tinypic.c...om/2e3u34x.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
<img src="http://i30.tinypic.c...com/zocg1g.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
<img src="http://i27.tinypic.c...om/15drodt.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
altre immagini e info, qua:
<a href="http://community.liv.../37694738.html" target="_blank">http://community.liv...694738.html</a>
<a href="http://www.eurogamer...mickey-for-wii" target="_blank">http://www.eurogamer...key-for-wii</a>
purtroppo il progetto sembra ancora a livello di sole concept art, però minchia... <img src="https://forum.everye...DIR#>/ohmy.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="" border="0" alt="ohmy.gif" />
Videoantepima @ GamesCom
Titolo: Epic Mickey
Sviluppatore: Junction Point
Publisher: Disney Interactive Studios
Genere: Platform/Action/RPG
Howard:Benvenuti al topic ufficiale di Epic Mickey.Data l'importanza del gioco,questa volta ci siamo tutti...e anche di più?
Kreese:Ma chi min*ia li voleva sti altri due,scusate?!?
Pit:Beh,per questa occasione,abbiamo bisogno di una mano,no?Il materiale è tanto,quindi...
Geno:Bando alle ciance,e presentiamo gli special guest di oggi...Phoenix Wright e il Professor Layton,recentissimamente acomunati dal prossimo videogioco che li vedrà un pò l'uno contro l'altro...vero?
Phoenix:Eh,un pò...tutto nasce quando ricevo la richiesta d'aiuto da parte di una ragazzina per un capo d'accusa di essere una strega che grava su di lei.Io all'inizio credevo fosse uno scherzo,ma leggendo meglio la lettera,ho cap
Layton:OBIEZIONE!
Howard,Kreese,Pit,Geno:*assurdo,obiezione a Phoenix...sti due hanno già iniziato a scambiarsi le abitudini*
Phoenix:...che c'è?
Layton:Le ricordo,Mr.Wright,che siamo qui per parlare di Epic Mickey,non del nostro gioco.Scusi per l'intrusione in quei modi,ma era dovuta...e ammetto che avevo intenzione di farlo,eheh.
*gli altri 5 svengono*
Il titolo,tornando a noi,venne rivelato ufficialmente,dopo mesi di artwork apocalittici,spifferate e quant'altro,nel numero di GameInformer di Novembre 2009,uscito ad Ottobre.
Quello stesso mese,poi,ci sarebbe stata la conferenza di Londra dove il titolo sarebbe stato presentato alla stampa anche più generalista.
Per accompagnare il tutto,la rivista decise di dare vari aggiornamenti con musiche,artwork e servizi sul gioco e oltre il gioco.
Ecco tutte le varie feature di GI.Buon divertimento.
Gli articoli speciali di Game Informer
5 Ottobre - Warren Spector & Topolino
Spoiler
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1ZjRu-AGSk&translated=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1ZjRu-AGSk&translated=1
9 Ottobre - L'ascesa di un'icona:la storia di Topolino
Spoiler
Most of the gaming generation grew up with Disney’s most famous character. Whether through viewing old cartoons, carrying a lunchbox with the iconic mouse ears, or playing one of his many video game incarnations, it’s hard to slip through childhood without some knowledge of Mickey Mouse. However, Mickey’s legacy extends several generations before the gaming world rose to prominence; the character has been an enduring cultural icon since the early 20th century.
In the coming days, Game Informer readers will learn all there is to know about Mickey’s triumphant return to video games. Disney Epic Mickey is firmly entrenched in the rich history of the character, so we thought it appropriate to look back at the long history of the Mickey’s life, both as a reminder of his presence in our culture over the years, and as a sneak peek at some of the characters and settings that show up in Warren Spector and Junction Point’s dramatic reinvention. To help illustrate our trip back in time, we went straight to the Disney Archives and Photo Library to find rarely seen photos, sketches, animation stills, and other illustrations from Mickey’s history. In addition, we asked Warren Spector, a Disney expert himself, to share his thoughts on the character.
Birth of an Icon
Mickey might never have been born were it not for another character that emerged from the early work of Walt Disney and his animation studio: Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. If you’ve never heard of him, you’re not alone. Few remember Walt Disney’s original cartoon star. Oswald appeared in several silent black and white films in the 1920s, only some of which have survived to the present day. This rabbit, not the now-famous mouse, might have taken the road to stardom were it not for a dispute between Walt Disney and his film financier.
In the cold winter of 1928, Walt Disney was in New York trying to get a small raise from his distributor, Charles Mintz, so that the Oswald cartoons could continue production. Disney hoped to increase the price per cartoon from $2,250 to $2,500. Mintz would have none of it – instead chopping the production budget down to $1,800 and demanding that Disney continue work or the character (who technically belonged to Mintz) would be taken away. Prior to this brutal ultimatum, Charles Mintz had even stolen away several of Disney’s key artists and animators.
“[Disney] lost Oswald because he refused to compromise on budget. So they fired him, found somebody who would do it cheaper, and guess what? Nobody remembers Oswald after Disney stopped doing him.”
-Warren Spector
Walt Disney wouldn’t be bullied, so this bitter negotiation signaled the end of Disney’s involvement with his beloved cartoon rabbit. It’s not clear exactly where and when Mickey Mouse came in to the picture, but the common story relayed by Walt Disney was that the idea of a mouse came to him on the train ride home to California after the disastrous meeting in New York. Disney collaborator Ub Iwerks had at least as much to do with the creation of the character as Disney himself. While much of the acclaim in later years would be heaped on Walt Disney, Ub Iwerks is the artist who gave form to the character. Most accounts relay that Disney first named the little guy Mortimer Mouse, but his wife declared that a terrible idea, and suggested Mickey instead. A star was born.
The Early Years
Mickey Mouse came into the public eye for the first time in Steamboat Willie, which premiered in New York in late 1928, only months after Disney’s loss of Oswald. The well-remembered cartoon was significant not only because it was the first appearance of one of the world’s most familiar fictional characters, but also because it had synchronized sound – a first for cartoons and a revelation for American audiences.
What many people don’t know is that Mickey actually had two cartoons that predated Steamboat Willie. Both Plane Crazy (1928) and Gallopin’ Gaucho (1928) debuted first, though they didn’t see wide public release at the time. Without sound, neither was deemed exciting enough to draw in the crowds. Both would later release with sound added in.
“The thing that I think set Disney apart more than anything else was his unwavering commitment to quality. He would not cheap out on anything. Animation at that point was this little backwater. No one cared about it. Disney really paid attention.”
-Warren Spector
Mickey’s first few cartoons, and those that followed in the early 1930s, reveal a dramatically different Mickey Mouse from the one we’ve become familiar with in recent years. Mickey was originally mischievous, petulant, and misbehaved. It’s an aspect of the character that has lain dormant for years, which begs the question: Why has this funny and scrappy version of the character been abandoned? “He was a guy who smoked and drank and shot guns, skewered people with swords, threw Minnie Mouse out of a plane when she wouldn’t kiss him, and abused farm animals,” Spector explains. “He was a badly behaved little guy. As he became more popular, I think Walt started saying, ‘Let’s make this guy more realistic. We don’t want to do things with this guy that the world isn’t going to like,’ so they started taming him and taking different parts of his personality.”
“Mickey is critical to both animation history and film history,” Spector continues. “He was absolutely and demonstrably the most recognizable and popular film star in the world for about three or four years in the early ‘30s. He was huge at the box office. It’s not an overstatement to say that he gave hope to an entire generation of people living through the Depression. He was a little ray of sunshine. He seems kind of sweet and innocent, and his films don’t seem as anarchic and crazy and maybe relevant as today’s films do, but at the time it was exactly what the country needed, what the world needed. So he was there to provide it.”
The early 1930s saw an explosion of adoration for Mickey Mouse, both through his cartoon shorts and a long-lived comic strip. Though the comic strips started out playing on sight gags, the serialized format of the newspaper allowed for more complex stories, sometimes across months and dozens of individual strips. The comics were originally drawn by Ub Iwerks, though Floyd Gottfredson eventually became the chief creative voice behind the strip. After ostensibly taking over as a temporary replacement, Gottfredson ended up crafting the comic for the next 45 years.
By 1932, only a few years after his initial appearance, the world was in love with Mickey Mouse. The Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences even awarded Walt Disney a special Oscar that year for his creation of the adored mouse. Mickey Mouse was also one of the earliest fictional characters to hit it big with merchandising. Watches, stuffed toys, bedside lamps, phones – Mickey Mouse branded items became unavoidable, a rarity during the dark days of the Great Depression.
The 1930s represent the height of popularity for the character. Disney’s studio pumped out 18 cartoons per year on average, and the character garnered international acclaim. By the middle of the decade, Mickey had his own magazine, comics, toys, movies, and regular coverage in newspapers and other media.
All Grown Up
Mickey Mouse’s rascally and rambunctious behavior became a victim of his success. With such broad appeal across the world, Disney inevitably chose to scale back Mickey’s more mischievous activities in favor of more friendly behavior. Many of Mickey’s more dangerous and questionable activities were either eliminated or shunted off to his many cartoon buddies. Spector elaborates: “They took his mischievousness and his anger and need for revenge and gave it to Donald. At some point they took his naïve simplicity and gave it to Goofy. They took his loyalty and infinite affection and gave it to Pluto of all things. They took his character and just shattered it, and all of a sudden he’s kind of a straight man for the gang.” Interestingly, during this transition in the late 1930s and into the 1940s, Donald Duck began his rise to popularity, which in many ways eclipsed Mickey in the following years.
The later 1930s still saw a wealth of great cartoons for Mickey – now mostly presented in color. One of the best was Brave Little Tailor (1938), which garnered an Academy Award nomination. Interestingly, it lost the award to another Disney film called Ferdinand the Bull (1938). Brave Little Tailor was one of the last shorts that depicted Mickey Mouse in his original, simplistic design.
With the release of The Pointer (1939) and Fantasia (1940), Mickey Mouse’s look evolved into his familiar modern appearance. Most notably, his eyes developed pupils and changed in shape and size. His body also grew less rat-like; his head grew larger, and his limbs slightly pudgy. In many ways, Mickey Mouse was made more overtly childlike in appearance.
The 1940s started off big for Mickey, with his appearance in the feature film Fantasia. For many, his role as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice is an overwhelming favorite. “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” saw hints of the troublemaking personality that the character first had, but it was the scope and grandeur of the feature film that amazed audiences. “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” had originally been planned as a short, but the incredible expense involved in its production led to an expansion of the original ambitions for the project, and other pieces of music and animation were added to create Fantasia in its final form. Though the film did not do particularly well at the box office upon its initial release, Fantasia continued to garner more and more affection as the years passed, especially for its stylish integration of music and animation. Today, Fantasia is regarded as one of Disney’s (and Mickey’s) greatest triumphs.
Much of the world’s attention in the early 1940s turned towards the momentous and terrible events of World War II. Mickey showed up in propaganda shots and other imagery supportive of the American war effort, and his presence in the cultural landscape of the war was apparent. Famously, the Allied command word on D-Day was “Mickey Mouse.” On the other side, a well-circulated German newspaper quote from the 1930s declared: “Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed... The dirty and filth-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom cannot be the ideal type of animal. Down with Mickey Mouse!” Harsh words for such a beloved American icon.
“By the ‘40s, he was so successful and so popular that taking any risks with him threatened the entire future of the company. Who’d be crazy enough to do that? Wait, other than me. No one’s nutty enough to do that.”
-Warren Spector
Mickey’s appearances in comics and film outside of the war effort in the 1940s depicted an increasingly suburban Mickey Mouse – playing golf and polo, coming home from work to toss his hat onto the stand by the door, and enjoying the occasional date with longtime sweetheart Minnie. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that many of these ideas and life experiences reflected those of creator Walt Disney at the time.
Great cartoons like Lend a Paw (1941) and The Nifty Nineties (1941) were highlights among Mickey’s increasingly sparse roles of the period. Mickey showed up in six cartoons in 1941, three in 1942, but only eight more throughout the rest of the decade. By the early 1950s, his film career was mostly non-existent.
Aging Gracefully
Though Mickey’s film stardom was on the wane, the character was far too recognizable and beloved to disappear from popular culture. The 1950s saw two major new steps for the mouse, each of which helped set the stage for the way following generations would meet him.
The first was The Mickey Mouse Club, which first aired in 1955. Filled with musical numbers and cartoons culled from Mickey’s vast catalogue of shorts, the show was a tremendous success, and expanded Mickey’s media presence to make him a television mainstay until 1959. The cast of talented young actors and singers would tackle special themed days, like Guest Star Day, Circus Day, Talent Roundup Day, and the always popular Anything Can Happen Day. The variety show for children, with its familiar theme song and joyous celebration of all things Disney, spawned a follow up series decades later in the form of The All New Mickey Mouse Club, which premiered in the 1970s.
The 1980s and early 1990s saw yet another attempt at bringing the property back to life with the MMC. This popular Disney Channel program is most notable for being the starting place for many current pop culture icons. Cast members included Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Keri Russell, JC Chasez, and Ryan Gosling, among others.
Back in the 1950s, the second major new project for Mickey Mouse was Disneyland. The California theme park featured Mickey in its many attractions, most notably as park visitors were able to interact with a costumed Mickey character. The park was the first of many – Walt Disney World opened in 1971, five years after the death of Walt Disney in 1966. More parks across the world, notably in Europe and Japan, released in later years.
Mickey’s presence in the media continued to scale back, but occasional cartoons have released over the years. The year 1983 found him in the role of Bob Cratchit in a remake of the Dickens’ classic entitled Mickey’s Christmas Carol. The Prince and the Pauper debuted in 1990, based on the 1882 Mark Twain story, where Mickey plays double duty as both the royal prince and his poorer look-alike. Finally, Runaway Brain (1995) explores a strange Frankenstein-inspired story where Mickey’s mind is exchanged with a monster named Julius.
Around the same time, Mickey found a home in a brand new medium: video games. Though the many games bearing his name vacillated wildly in quality, they succeeded in bringing Mickey Mouse to a new generation. The early Nintendo release Mickey Mousecapade (1988) helped to begin a long line of Capcom-published Disney adventures. Around the same time, Sega enjoyed great success with Castle of Illusion (1990) and its sequels. More recently, Mickey made memorable guest appearances in the Kingdom Hearts series.
The 21st century has seen little of Disney’s once-ubiquitous mouse, which is on the threshold of changing in some dramatic ways. Warren Spector has taken the reins of the classic character, and is targeting a new game for release on the most widely owned system of this hardware generation: the Wii. Disney Epic Mickey reveals a major new direction for the character, but one that is rooted in his earliest birth and history. “The irony is I think the best way to rejuvenate or revitalize the character, whether in a game or in a movie or anywhere else, is to return him to his roots,” Spector says. “Mickey used to be a character who about whom kids could say, ‘He’s acting out for me,’ and I think he could do that again.” For the full story on the new game, read this month’s issue of Game Informer, and then check back here after throughout the month for expanded articles, videos, interviews, and details on what might be the biggest and most ambitious third-party Wii game yet created.
If you’d like to learn more about the history of Walt Disney, his animation studio, and Mickey Mouse, then you’ll love the following books. The meticulous research found in each was invaluable to this article.
* Disney’s Art of Animation: From Mickey Mouse to Beauty and the Beast; by Bob Thomas
* Encyclopedia of Walt Disney’s Animated Characters; by John Grant
* Mickey Mouse: Fifty Happy Years; edited by David Bain and Bruce Harris
* Mickey Mouse: My Life In Pictures; by Russell Schroeder
Most of the gaming generation grew up with Disney’s most famous character. Whether through viewing old cartoons, carrying a lunchbox with the iconic mouse ears, or playing one of his many video game incarnations, it’s hard to slip through childhood without some knowledge of Mickey Mouse. However, Mickey’s legacy extends several generations before the gaming world rose to prominence; the character has been an enduring cultural icon since the early 20th century.
In the coming days, Game Informer readers will learn all there is to know about Mickey’s triumphant return to video games. Disney Epic Mickey is firmly entrenched in the rich history of the character, so we thought it appropriate to look back at the long history of the Mickey’s life, both as a reminder of his presence in our culture over the years, and as a sneak peek at some of the characters and settings that show up in Warren Spector and Junction Point’s dramatic reinvention. To help illustrate our trip back in time, we went straight to the Disney Archives and Photo Library to find rarely seen photos, sketches, animation stills, and other illustrations from Mickey’s history. In addition, we asked Warren Spector, a Disney expert himself, to share his thoughts on the character.
Birth of an Icon
Mickey might never have been born were it not for another character that emerged from the early work of Walt Disney and his animation studio: Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. If you’ve never heard of him, you’re not alone. Few remember Walt Disney’s original cartoon star. Oswald appeared in several silent black and white films in the 1920s, only some of which have survived to the present day. This rabbit, not the now-famous mouse, might have taken the road to stardom were it not for a dispute between Walt Disney and his film financier.
In the cold winter of 1928, Walt Disney was in New York trying to get a small raise from his distributor, Charles Mintz, so that the Oswald cartoons could continue production. Disney hoped to increase the price per cartoon from $2,250 to $2,500. Mintz would have none of it – instead chopping the production budget down to $1,800 and demanding that Disney continue work or the character (who technically belonged to Mintz) would be taken away. Prior to this brutal ultimatum, Charles Mintz had even stolen away several of Disney’s key artists and animators.
“[Disney] lost Oswald because he refused to compromise on budget. So they fired him, found somebody who would do it cheaper, and guess what? Nobody remembers Oswald after Disney stopped doing him.”
-Warren Spector
Walt Disney wouldn’t be bullied, so this bitter negotiation signaled the end of Disney’s involvement with his beloved cartoon rabbit. It’s not clear exactly where and when Mickey Mouse came in to the picture, but the common story relayed by Walt Disney was that the idea of a mouse came to him on the train ride home to California after the disastrous meeting in New York. Disney collaborator Ub Iwerks had at least as much to do with the creation of the character as Disney himself. While much of the acclaim in later years would be heaped on Walt Disney, Ub Iwerks is the artist who gave form to the character. Most accounts relay that Disney first named the little guy Mortimer Mouse, but his wife declared that a terrible idea, and suggested Mickey instead. A star was born.
The Early Years
Mickey Mouse came into the public eye for the first time in Steamboat Willie, which premiered in New York in late 1928, only months after Disney’s loss of Oswald. The well-remembered cartoon was significant not only because it was the first appearance of one of the world’s most familiar fictional characters, but also because it had synchronized sound – a first for cartoons and a revelation for American audiences.
What many people don’t know is that Mickey actually had two cartoons that predated Steamboat Willie. Both Plane Crazy (1928) and Gallopin’ Gaucho (1928) debuted first, though they didn’t see wide public release at the time. Without sound, neither was deemed exciting enough to draw in the crowds. Both would later release with sound added in.
“The thing that I think set Disney apart more than anything else was his unwavering commitment to quality. He would not cheap out on anything. Animation at that point was this little backwater. No one cared about it. Disney really paid attention.”
-Warren Spector
Mickey’s first few cartoons, and those that followed in the early 1930s, reveal a dramatically different Mickey Mouse from the one we’ve become familiar with in recent years. Mickey was originally mischievous, petulant, and misbehaved. It’s an aspect of the character that has lain dormant for years, which begs the question: Why has this funny and scrappy version of the character been abandoned? “He was a guy who smoked and drank and shot guns, skewered people with swords, threw Minnie Mouse out of a plane when she wouldn’t kiss him, and abused farm animals,” Spector explains. “He was a badly behaved little guy. As he became more popular, I think Walt started saying, ‘Let’s make this guy more realistic. We don’t want to do things with this guy that the world isn’t going to like,’ so they started taming him and taking different parts of his personality.”
“Mickey is critical to both animation history and film history,” Spector continues. “He was absolutely and demonstrably the most recognizable and popular film star in the world for about three or four years in the early ‘30s. He was huge at the box office. It’s not an overstatement to say that he gave hope to an entire generation of people living through the Depression. He was a little ray of sunshine. He seems kind of sweet and innocent, and his films don’t seem as anarchic and crazy and maybe relevant as today’s films do, but at the time it was exactly what the country needed, what the world needed. So he was there to provide it.”
The early 1930s saw an explosion of adoration for Mickey Mouse, both through his cartoon shorts and a long-lived comic strip. Though the comic strips started out playing on sight gags, the serialized format of the newspaper allowed for more complex stories, sometimes across months and dozens of individual strips. The comics were originally drawn by Ub Iwerks, though Floyd Gottfredson eventually became the chief creative voice behind the strip. After ostensibly taking over as a temporary replacement, Gottfredson ended up crafting the comic for the next 45 years.
By 1932, only a few years after his initial appearance, the world was in love with Mickey Mouse. The Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences even awarded Walt Disney a special Oscar that year for his creation of the adored mouse. Mickey Mouse was also one of the earliest fictional characters to hit it big with merchandising. Watches, stuffed toys, bedside lamps, phones – Mickey Mouse branded items became unavoidable, a rarity during the dark days of the Great Depression.
The 1930s represent the height of popularity for the character. Disney’s studio pumped out 18 cartoons per year on average, and the character garnered international acclaim. By the middle of the decade, Mickey had his own magazine, comics, toys, movies, and regular coverage in newspapers and other media.
All Grown Up
Mickey Mouse’s rascally and rambunctious behavior became a victim of his success. With such broad appeal across the world, Disney inevitably chose to scale back Mickey’s more mischievous activities in favor of more friendly behavior. Many of Mickey’s more dangerous and questionable activities were either eliminated or shunted off to his many cartoon buddies. Spector elaborates: “They took his mischievousness and his anger and need for revenge and gave it to Donald. At some point they took his naïve simplicity and gave it to Goofy. They took his loyalty and infinite affection and gave it to Pluto of all things. They took his character and just shattered it, and all of a sudden he’s kind of a straight man for the gang.” Interestingly, during this transition in the late 1930s and into the 1940s, Donald Duck began his rise to popularity, which in many ways eclipsed Mickey in the following years.
The later 1930s still saw a wealth of great cartoons for Mickey – now mostly presented in color. One of the best was Brave Little Tailor (1938), which garnered an Academy Award nomination. Interestingly, it lost the award to another Disney film called Ferdinand the Bull (1938). Brave Little Tailor was one of the last shorts that depicted Mickey Mouse in his original, simplistic design.
With the release of The Pointer (1939) and Fantasia (1940), Mickey Mouse’s look evolved into his familiar modern appearance. Most notably, his eyes developed pupils and changed in shape and size. His body also grew less rat-like; his head grew larger, and his limbs slightly pudgy. In many ways, Mickey Mouse was made more overtly childlike in appearance.
The 1940s started off big for Mickey, with his appearance in the feature film Fantasia. For many, his role as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice is an overwhelming favorite. “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” saw hints of the troublemaking personality that the character first had, but it was the scope and grandeur of the feature film that amazed audiences. “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” had originally been planned as a short, but the incredible expense involved in its production led to an expansion of the original ambitions for the project, and other pieces of music and animation were added to create Fantasia in its final form. Though the film did not do particularly well at the box office upon its initial release, Fantasia continued to garner more and more affection as the years passed, especially for its stylish integration of music and animation. Today, Fantasia is regarded as one of Disney’s (and Mickey’s) greatest triumphs.
Much of the world’s attention in the early 1940s turned towards the momentous and terrible events of World War II. Mickey showed up in propaganda shots and other imagery supportive of the American war effort, and his presence in the cultural landscape of the war was apparent. Famously, the Allied command word on D-Day was “Mickey Mouse.” On the other side, a well-circulated German newspaper quote from the 1930s declared: “Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed... The dirty and filth-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom cannot be the ideal type of animal. Down with Mickey Mouse!” Harsh words for such a beloved American icon.
“By the ‘40s, he was so successful and so popular that taking any risks with him threatened the entire future of the company. Who’d be crazy enough to do that? Wait, other than me. No one’s nutty enough to do that.”
-Warren Spector
Mickey’s appearances in comics and film outside of the war effort in the 1940s depicted an increasingly suburban Mickey Mouse – playing golf and polo, coming home from work to toss his hat onto the stand by the door, and enjoying the occasional date with longtime sweetheart Minnie. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that many of these ideas and life experiences reflected those of creator Walt Disney at the time.
Great cartoons like Lend a Paw (1941) and The Nifty Nineties (1941) were highlights among Mickey’s increasingly sparse roles of the period. Mickey showed up in six cartoons in 1941, three in 1942, but only eight more throughout the rest of the decade. By the early 1950s, his film career was mostly non-existent.
Aging Gracefully
Though Mickey’s film stardom was on the wane, the character was far too recognizable and beloved to disappear from popular culture. The 1950s saw two major new steps for the mouse, each of which helped set the stage for the way following generations would meet him.
The first was The Mickey Mouse Club, which first aired in 1955. Filled with musical numbers and cartoons culled from Mickey’s vast catalogue of shorts, the show was a tremendous success, and expanded Mickey’s media presence to make him a television mainstay until 1959. The cast of talented young actors and singers would tackle special themed days, like Guest Star Day, Circus Day, Talent Roundup Day, and the always popular Anything Can Happen Day. The variety show for children, with its familiar theme song and joyous celebration of all things Disney, spawned a follow up series decades later in the form of The All New Mickey Mouse Club, which premiered in the 1970s.
The 1980s and early 1990s saw yet another attempt at bringing the property back to life with the MMC. This popular Disney Channel program is most notable for being the starting place for many current pop culture icons. Cast members included Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Keri Russell, JC Chasez, and Ryan Gosling, among others.
Back in the 1950s, the second major new project for Mickey Mouse was Disneyland. The California theme park featured Mickey in its many attractions, most notably as park visitors were able to interact with a costumed Mickey character. The park was the first of many – Walt Disney World opened in 1971, five years after the death of Walt Disney in 1966. More parks across the world, notably in Europe and Japan, released in later years.
Mickey’s presence in the media continued to scale back, but occasional cartoons have released over the years. The year 1983 found him in the role of Bob Cratchit in a remake of the Dickens’ classic entitled Mickey’s Christmas Carol. The Prince and the Pauper debuted in 1990, based on the 1882 Mark Twain story, where Mickey plays double duty as both the royal prince and his poorer look-alike. Finally, Runaway Brain (1995) explores a strange Frankenstein-inspired story where Mickey’s mind is exchanged with a monster named Julius.
Around the same time, Mickey found a home in a brand new medium: video games. Though the many games bearing his name vacillated wildly in quality, they succeeded in bringing Mickey Mouse to a new generation. The early Nintendo release Mickey Mousecapade (1988) helped to begin a long line of Capcom-published Disney adventures. Around the same time, Sega enjoyed great success with Castle of Illusion (1990) and its sequels. More recently, Mickey made memorable guest appearances in the Kingdom Hearts series.
The 21st century has seen little of Disney’s once-ubiquitous mouse, which is on the threshold of changing in some dramatic ways. Warren Spector has taken the reins of the classic character, and is targeting a new game for release on the most widely owned system of this hardware generation: the Wii. Disney Epic Mickey reveals a major new direction for the character, but one that is rooted in his earliest birth and history. “The irony is I think the best way to rejuvenate or revitalize the character, whether in a game or in a movie or anywhere else, is to return him to his roots,” Spector says. “Mickey used to be a character who about whom kids could say, ‘He’s acting out for me,’ and I think he could do that again.” For the full story on the new game, read this month’s issue of Game Informer, and then check back here after throughout the month for expanded articles, videos, interviews, and details on what might be the biggest and most ambitious third-party Wii game yet created.
If you’d like to learn more about the history of Walt Disney, his animation studio, and Mickey Mouse, then you’ll love the following books. The meticulous research found in each was invaluable to this article.
* Disney’s Art of Animation: From Mickey Mouse to Beauty and the Beast; by Bob Thomas
* Encyclopedia of Walt Disney’s Animated Characters; by John Grant
* Mickey Mouse: Fifty Happy Years; edited by David Bain and Bruce Harris
* Mickey Mouse: My Life In Pictures; by Russell Schroeder
12 Ottobre - Disegnando Topolino:il video velocizzato
15 Ottobre
1) L'arte di Epic Mickey
Spoiler
Now that subscribers are starting to get their copies of the newly redesigned Game Informer with Epic Mickey on the cover, we’re ready to show off a little more of the game. The assets floating around the web have had users excited but unsure about what Junction Point has been up to. Now we’re ready to show off the very first official art behind Disney Epic Mickey. This short video featuring music from the game will give you just a small glimpse of the world that awaits when Mickey Mouse makes his triumphant return to games.
And if you missed it, check out our exclusive time-lapse showing off more awesome art. And we've also got an Epic Mickey hub here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRi4m_pNVrU
Now that subscribers are starting to get their copies of the newly redesigned Game Informer with Epic Mickey on the cover, we’re ready to show off a little more of the game. The assets floating around the web have had users excited but unsure about what Junction Point has been up to. Now we’re ready to show off the very first official art behind Disney Epic Mickey. This short video featuring music from the game will give you just a small glimpse of the world that awaits when Mickey Mouse makes his triumphant return to games.
And if you missed it, check out our exclusive time-lapse showing off more awesome art. And we've also got an Epic Mickey hub here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRi4m_pNVrU
2) A parole sue:Un profilo di un ideatore di giochi,Warren Spector
Spoiler
Warren Spector’s projects over the years span some of the most critically acclaimed franchises in gaming history. The breadth of genres and styles in which he has worked demonstrate a remarkable facility for adapting new ideas. This month, Game Informer showcases the latest project from Warren Spector and his new studio Junction Point – Disney Epic Mickey. The game represents both a new direction and a culmination of ideas from a long career in the gaming industry. Here, then, is the story of a visionary career from the man who lived it.
The Early Origin Years
Warren Spector studied film in college, but ended up spending much of the ‘80s in tabletop RPGs. By 1990, the constraints of those rulesets helped drive Spector to a new career. The video game world almost lost one of its greatest stars when Spector briefly considered taking a job with Disney as an “imagineer”, helping to craft rides for their theme parks. However, the job offer at Origin Games came in first, and Spector joined the company beside such industry luminaries as Richard Garriot (Ultima) and Chris Roberts (Wing Commander).
“I’ve been making video games for 20 years now. I’ve spent that entire time trying to break down that barrier and get back to that freedom and joy of players actually controlling the story in a tabletop, face-to-face game.”
- On tabletop RPGs and video games
“In computer games I just saw the opportunity to tell stories in a brand new way. All of the tools and techniques that you learn as a film production guy or as a film critic, they sort of translate over to this new medium pretty well. At least I thought they did. At the end of the day as a paper game guy and a movie guy, I think I had to unlearn more than I actually brought to electronic games, but I’m still telling stories 30 years later.”
- On his move into video games
"With Wing Commander it was one of those things where the clarity and power of Chris’ vision was so overwhelming. You could see what he wanted it to be and what it could be. I had all that film background. I knew I could help make those cinematics better. It kind of exercised a different part of who I am.”
- On Chris Roberts and Wing Commander
“In terms of learning, influence, and professional growth, working with Richard Garriott on Ultima 6 was incredible. I spent two weeks at Richard’s house planning out Ultima 6 and that was a master’s degree. It was unbelievable. I learned so much from him in those two weeks it was scary.”
- On Richard Garriot and Ultima
Through the Looking Glass
While still tied to work at Origin, Spector also participated in projects with legendary, now defunct Looking Glass Studios. There, he worked with Doug Church during the creation of System Shock and spent time producing Thief: The Dark Project, one of the original stealth games, among other titles.
“The big leap for System Shock was the realization that we don’t need all of that behind-the-scenes, die-rolling-traditional-RPG-stats stuff. It’s you in this world. Nothing reminded you it was a game. That was at the time a revolutionary idea, and still is now – that it’s you, not some goofy little puppet that you’re driving around.”
- On System Shock
“We worked together on Underworld, Underworld 2, System Shock, and Thief. Good lord, the guy is the unsung hero of video games and needs to get more credit than he does. Anyway, my job was to work with him to make sure we were making the game that we should be making, to make sure that creatively it was on the right track, to help him out with creative input when he needed it, to make sure that the game was being executed at the highest level.”
- On Doug Church and Looking Glass Studios
The Great Experiment
By 1997, Spector joined a cadre of game industry heavyweights, including Doom creator John Romero, at Ion Storm. By the time Spector joined the burgeoning community of developers, a Dallas office was already up and running. Spector founded an Austin branch, which turned out to have great success, particularly through its release of the groundbreaking Deus Ex.
“You know, it sounds like such a good idea to let the inmates run the insane asylums, and it really isn’t. You really do need adult supervision to do something like this. Ion had no adult supervision. There were incredibly talented people. John Romero, his heart is so in the right place and he loves games so much, but running a company may not be playing to his strengths. Tom Hall, same thing. None of us should have been running companies at that point in our lives, I guess. That was the big problem. We all felt like we were talented, creative guys with big ideas, and if the big bad publishers would just get out of the way we can do amazing things. It just doesn’t work out that way. Real creativity happens within constraints, not without constraints.”
- On Ion Storm
“Deus Ex is still the [career] highpoint for me, personally. One of the things about making games, at least for me, is you start out with a vision of what something can be and you close your eyes and you imagine this thing. A couple of years later, you open your eyes and the thing you created could be wonderful, but it’s not like the thing you imagined originally. Deus Ex is the one and only time I ever opened my eyes after three years and said ‘holy cow, this is what I imagined.’”
- On his favorite project
“I think the big innovation of Deus Ex was it was the first game where play style mattered. Other games had offered some branch points and some choices, but I believe - whether it’s true or not - I believe we were the first game to offer choice with consequence. The choices really mattered. If you went and killed everything that moves in the game, you had a different experience than the player that killed nobody.”
- On the innovation of Deus Ex
A Junction Point
Warren Spector left Ion Storm in 2004 to found his own development house, which he called Junction Point Studios, after a never-released MMO he had worked on years earlier. The studio was purchased in 2007 by Disney Interactive. Rumors of his next big project have circulated for years. His longtime interest in film, storytelling, and classic cartoons offers a major hint of what’s to come.
“It’s a place where a bunch of genres come together, and Junction Point is a place where a lot of things can come together and you can go anywhere. You can come to this point, this Junction Point, and decide ‘do I want to go left, right, up, or down?’ You get to decide the path you take. That expresses what I think is important about the games we’re going to make here.”
- On the name Junction Point
“I wrote my master’s thesis on Warner Brothers cartoons and on how cartoon characters develop over time, so I’m a cartoon fanatic and always have been. There’s this wild, anarchic, experimental spirit in classic cartoons. The Warner Brothers stuff, the early Disney stuff, the Fleischer stuff, the Popeye cartoons, the Betty Boops, all of those guys it’s like they were smoking crack or something. The stuff they were doing was crazy, and modern, and experimental, and telling audiences all about how movies work. Lifting the veil and exposing all the sprocket holes, and gears, and magic behind how a movie works. I was really intrigued by that. I’ve always loved cartoons. I always will, I hope.”
- On cartoons, while hinting at his future project
“This is so freaky, but there have been a couple of people that have written master theses about the games I’ve worked on. There was one I read, and it pointed out that three things have appeared in all of my games. There’s always a basketball court; that one is on purpose, by the way. The second thing is there is always an altered state of reality. The last thing that this academic pointed out to me was that every game I’ve worked on has in some way been about a family relationship. It doesn’t necessarily mean a literal nuclear family, but it’s always about the close bonds that we form with each other and how they break up. Maybe I’ve just been in an extended therapy session for the last 26 years.”
- On the ties that bind his games together
For all our exclusive articles, videos, and details on Disney Epic Mickey, check out Epic Mickey landing page. Or, to continue learning more about Warren Spector and his love of all things Disney, click here.
Design and layout by Meagan VanBurkleo
Warren Spector’s projects over the years span some of the most critically acclaimed franchises in gaming history. The breadth of genres and styles in which he has worked demonstrate a remarkable facility for adapting new ideas. This month, Game Informer showcases the latest project from Warren Spector and his new studio Junction Point – Disney Epic Mickey. The game represents both a new direction and a culmination of ideas from a long career in the gaming industry. Here, then, is the story of a visionary career from the man who lived it.
The Early Origin Years
Warren Spector studied film in college, but ended up spending much of the ‘80s in tabletop RPGs. By 1990, the constraints of those rulesets helped drive Spector to a new career. The video game world almost lost one of its greatest stars when Spector briefly considered taking a job with Disney as an “imagineer”, helping to craft rides for their theme parks. However, the job offer at Origin Games came in first, and Spector joined the company beside such industry luminaries as Richard Garriot (Ultima) and Chris Roberts (Wing Commander).
“I’ve been making video games for 20 years now. I’ve spent that entire time trying to break down that barrier and get back to that freedom and joy of players actually controlling the story in a tabletop, face-to-face game.”
- On tabletop RPGs and video games
“In computer games I just saw the opportunity to tell stories in a brand new way. All of the tools and techniques that you learn as a film production guy or as a film critic, they sort of translate over to this new medium pretty well. At least I thought they did. At the end of the day as a paper game guy and a movie guy, I think I had to unlearn more than I actually brought to electronic games, but I’m still telling stories 30 years later.”
- On his move into video games
"With Wing Commander it was one of those things where the clarity and power of Chris’ vision was so overwhelming. You could see what he wanted it to be and what it could be. I had all that film background. I knew I could help make those cinematics better. It kind of exercised a different part of who I am.”
- On Chris Roberts and Wing Commander
“In terms of learning, influence, and professional growth, working with Richard Garriott on Ultima 6 was incredible. I spent two weeks at Richard’s house planning out Ultima 6 and that was a master’s degree. It was unbelievable. I learned so much from him in those two weeks it was scary.”
- On Richard Garriot and Ultima
Through the Looking Glass
While still tied to work at Origin, Spector also participated in projects with legendary, now defunct Looking Glass Studios. There, he worked with Doug Church during the creation of System Shock and spent time producing Thief: The Dark Project, one of the original stealth games, among other titles.
“The big leap for System Shock was the realization that we don’t need all of that behind-the-scenes, die-rolling-traditional-RPG-stats stuff. It’s you in this world. Nothing reminded you it was a game. That was at the time a revolutionary idea, and still is now – that it’s you, not some goofy little puppet that you’re driving around.”
- On System Shock
“We worked together on Underworld, Underworld 2, System Shock, and Thief. Good lord, the guy is the unsung hero of video games and needs to get more credit than he does. Anyway, my job was to work with him to make sure we were making the game that we should be making, to make sure that creatively it was on the right track, to help him out with creative input when he needed it, to make sure that the game was being executed at the highest level.”
- On Doug Church and Looking Glass Studios
The Great Experiment
By 1997, Spector joined a cadre of game industry heavyweights, including Doom creator John Romero, at Ion Storm. By the time Spector joined the burgeoning community of developers, a Dallas office was already up and running. Spector founded an Austin branch, which turned out to have great success, particularly through its release of the groundbreaking Deus Ex.
“You know, it sounds like such a good idea to let the inmates run the insane asylums, and it really isn’t. You really do need adult supervision to do something like this. Ion had no adult supervision. There were incredibly talented people. John Romero, his heart is so in the right place and he loves games so much, but running a company may not be playing to his strengths. Tom Hall, same thing. None of us should have been running companies at that point in our lives, I guess. That was the big problem. We all felt like we were talented, creative guys with big ideas, and if the big bad publishers would just get out of the way we can do amazing things. It just doesn’t work out that way. Real creativity happens within constraints, not without constraints.”
- On Ion Storm
“Deus Ex is still the [career] highpoint for me, personally. One of the things about making games, at least for me, is you start out with a vision of what something can be and you close your eyes and you imagine this thing. A couple of years later, you open your eyes and the thing you created could be wonderful, but it’s not like the thing you imagined originally. Deus Ex is the one and only time I ever opened my eyes after three years and said ‘holy cow, this is what I imagined.’”
- On his favorite project
“I think the big innovation of Deus Ex was it was the first game where play style mattered. Other games had offered some branch points and some choices, but I believe - whether it’s true or not - I believe we were the first game to offer choice with consequence. The choices really mattered. If you went and killed everything that moves in the game, you had a different experience than the player that killed nobody.”
- On the innovation of Deus Ex
A Junction Point
Warren Spector left Ion Storm in 2004 to found his own development house, which he called Junction Point Studios, after a never-released MMO he had worked on years earlier. The studio was purchased in 2007 by Disney Interactive. Rumors of his next big project have circulated for years. His longtime interest in film, storytelling, and classic cartoons offers a major hint of what’s to come.
“It’s a place where a bunch of genres come together, and Junction Point is a place where a lot of things can come together and you can go anywhere. You can come to this point, this Junction Point, and decide ‘do I want to go left, right, up, or down?’ You get to decide the path you take. That expresses what I think is important about the games we’re going to make here.”
- On the name Junction Point
“I wrote my master’s thesis on Warner Brothers cartoons and on how cartoon characters develop over time, so I’m a cartoon fanatic and always have been. There’s this wild, anarchic, experimental spirit in classic cartoons. The Warner Brothers stuff, the early Disney stuff, the Fleischer stuff, the Popeye cartoons, the Betty Boops, all of those guys it’s like they were smoking crack or something. The stuff they were doing was crazy, and modern, and experimental, and telling audiences all about how movies work. Lifting the veil and exposing all the sprocket holes, and gears, and magic behind how a movie works. I was really intrigued by that. I’ve always loved cartoons. I always will, I hope.”
- On cartoons, while hinting at his future project
“This is so freaky, but there have been a couple of people that have written master theses about the games I’ve worked on. There was one I read, and it pointed out that three things have appeared in all of my games. There’s always a basketball court; that one is on purpose, by the way. The second thing is there is always an altered state of reality. The last thing that this academic pointed out to me was that every game I’ve worked on has in some way been about a family relationship. It doesn’t necessarily mean a literal nuclear family, but it’s always about the close bonds that we form with each other and how they break up. Maybe I’ve just been in an extended therapy session for the last 26 years.”
- On the ties that bind his games together
For all our exclusive articles, videos, and details on Disney Epic Mickey, check out Epic Mickey landing page. Or, to continue learning more about Warren Spector and his love of all things Disney, click here.
Design and layout by Meagan VanBurkleo
3) Junction Point: Un profilo sullo studio
19 Ottobre - Inside the game:Epic Mickey
Spoiler
An In Depth Look at the Art and Animation
Disney Epic Mickey is months away from release, but the work involved in its creation began years ago. Anyone who has perused the November 2009 issue of Game Informer understands the project’s dramatic scope and ambition. However, we can only fit so much information in the magazine. In our first Inside the Game online feature, we follow the art and animation development from concept to implementation to get a better sense of how Mickey and his world came to life. Don’t miss your first-ever chance to see early animation tests of Mickey and his friends in action.
The World
Caption: Even a small section or level takes many steps to emerge into gameplay. In Epic Mickey, special 2D side-scrolling levels interconnect the larger 3D areas. Every one of these 2D images is based on an old Disney cartoon classic. This area was based on Clock Cleaners, a 1937 cartoon starring Mickey, Donald, and Goofy. Using scenes from the original as inspiration, the team creates a colored concept art piece to illustrate the idea of the level. Designers work together with the artists to shape the level, and indicate the motions of the many cogs, gears, and platforms in the scene. With those directions in hand, the team can implement a three-dimensional, functional version. Finally, Mickey can jump into action and the level can begin being tested and modified.
The process of level creation begins as a collaborative project; as the development team throws around ideas for game design and story the artists begin work on concept art in earnest.
“It starts on paper with the general idea of the storyline that Warren [Spector] is going for,” explains art director Lee Harker. “We read on paper the general gist of what the level or the area is supposed to be, and we just start firing off ideas all over the place. At that point Warren will come by and we’ll review the work and talk about general direction that we want to go for in each of these areas. Once we nail in on something, it’s just a matter of refining it and refining it until we have it just right.”
Caption: Concept art serves a far more important role than being inspirational imagery or fodder for magazine articles. Good concept art can help guide or inform the development of an entire stage of the game.
From early on, the game featured story elements that emerged from the history of Mickey Mouse, which the art needed to reflect. “You’ve got this wealth of subject matter out there that’s known all around the world and respected by so many people. It’s just an honor to be able to work with that, and it’s a big responsibility as well,” Harker admits. “You’ve got to continue on top of all these great artists that have come before you and build off of it.”
The Brave Little Tailor
Caption: The style of the cartoon and inert objects in the world shouldn’t be difficult to spot, thanks to clever visualization by Junction Point. Toon objects can be created and erased by the player; inert objects are permanent and real, and double as a way to put limits on the shape of the world.
While the concepts embraced the long history of a beloved character, Spector’s vision for the game took Mickey in a new direction. Much of that tonal shift was established under the eye of Rolf Mohr, the visual development director on the project in its early days.
“I look at our game even now a while out from shipping – I’m prejudiced obviously – but I think it looks fantastic,” Warren Spector tells us. “I gave Rolf a nearly impossible task. I said, ‘We’re creating a world where we have to have this painted, bright, cartoony, puffy marshmallow look side-by-side with this gray, blasted, dark, twisted, pointy, inert look.’” The resulting art style that Mohr and the rest of the team created was a mix of aesthetics, using familiar visual cues of colors and angles to help gamers immediately identify the different objects and creatures on screen.
Caption: Early in the game, Mickey finds himself under examination in the Mad Doctor’s lab. The original version of this lab was nearing completion when members of the art team became increasingly dissatisfied with their first attempt. Much of the lab level was scrapped, and a new version was developed over several weeks and put into place. “It just became apparent that we could really do a whole lot better,” art director Harker says. “So the team decided they wanted to take that on themselves, and they pretty much lived here for three weeks to get it right on their own.”
With the art style established, concept artists begin their work in earnest. In the case of Epic Mickey, the art team maintains a constant contact with the level design team. It’s an essential cooperation, since the central gameplay mechanic revolves around a paintbrush that can paint in and erase elements of the world as a player moves through the game. “If you look at the cartoon stuff in the world, all of that is supposed to be stuff players can affect,” Harker explains. “So that ties directly into the game’s design. You can’t have it be a complete free-for-all where we just put colorful cartoon stuff everywhere, and that mucks up the design where you’re able to access areas that the designers don’t want you to.”
Swinging into Action
Caption: These three simple images illustrate the central gameplay mechanic of Epic Mickey. Paint is used to fill in blank, glittering spaces, and thinner can erase objects. At times, players can erase sections of an object, utilizing the new shape of the object as a platform to ascend to a different location. In many ways, the game aims to let the player design his or her own path through a level. From an art perspective, objects like this bookshelf pose unique challenges. Not only must the object be interesting to look at, but also it also must be an integrated part of the level design.
Environment artists take the concept art and integrate it into a 3D framework through an imaging program called Maya. The environment team then changes size and shape of objects in a way that helps guide the players through the world. The level designers continue to contribute the necessary elements so the levels emerge as engaging and fun playgrounds. By this point, the designers and other parts of the development team can jump into a rough version of an environment and begin playtesting. But to do so, another major component has to be progressing at the same pace – characters.
Caption: Dozens of images from multiple artists help to establish the look, color, lighting, and overall vision for a given level. If you’ve spent any time at Disneyland, you’ll also notice how much the Gremlin Village has in common with the “It’s a Small World” attraction.
Characters and Animation
By necessity, the character artists need to stay one step ahead of those working on the environments and levels. “They’ve got to have the characters done in time to get them to the animators. So we want those guys way out in front,” Harker says.
Caption: Character artists on Epic Mickey begin with numerous exploratory sketches that establish the overall style for a character. If they have an existing reference, they work off of that as a starting point. In the case of the Mad Doctor, the artists looked back to the 1933 cartoon in which he first appeared. After sketches, the team creates colored character images and passes them off to be rendered in 3D.
The character artists’ most important focus is obviously Mickey, as players constantly interact with him. Dozens of versions of Mickey Mouse are created and scrapped, exploring any number of ways to interpret the classic character. At times, these new versions are elongated and modern, and at other times they stay as close as possible to older interpretations of the character. As of now, the team has settled on a colorful version of Mickey that reflects how he appeared in the 1930s – mischievous and cartoony. However, Spector demands a character that alters in response to player actions, so the character art team must create three Mickeys – a dark scrapper, a middle-of-the road version, and a heroic version. Each one poses differently and looks different, and the distinction needs to be sharp enough for players to recognize at a glance.
Caption: “How you decide to play the game should make a difference. You get to determine what kind of hero you are. Everybody solves the problem. Everybody saves the day. Everybody gets to save the world and gets the girl,” Warren Spector tells us, in regards to the shifting spectrum of play styles that change the appearance of Mickey throughout the game. “But how you do it, and how you end up looking is up to you. What abilities you have is up to you. Who likes you is up to you. What missions you hear about or not is up to you.” Each version of Mickey has a distinct look crafted by the character artists at Mickey, from the crouching and feral scrapper to the stalwart hero.
Even after a nearly complete version of Mickey is ready to go, the character artists have plenty of work to do right through the end of the project. New characters are added all the time, but the goal is to give more complicated and important characters the attention early, as they will be the ones that have the most complex and involved animation sets to complete.
Caption: Junction Point has developed a brand new antagonist to fit into Disney lore. The beetleworx are built by the Mad Doctor, and they act as a maintenance crew to the game world. Unlike many potential enemies in the game, they can’t be fully erased by Mickey’s magic paintbrush, so the art team had an interesting challenge to overcome: shape a potential enemy formed of both sharp, inert objects and marshmallowy cartoon shapes. Their solution lay in pulling together elements from across the familiar Disney theme park landscape and combining them on top of a metallic framework. Careful viewers will see elements from across Disney fiction combined together on this figure.
Animators keep in close contact with the character artists long before they begin bringing them to life. “We don’t want to overcomplicate things, but we also want to make sure that when the animation finally gets to us, all our needs can be met, and that we’re not creating something that’s going to be a problem down the road,” explains lead animator Jorma Auburn. The goal is to keep the character artists in the loop on what requires time and energy to animate and compute. “If it is going to be an ambient creature, and you want to have a lot of them on the screen, then having a bug with 20 legs is not the way to go,” Auburn says.
Caption: Warren Spector hopes to reinvigorate Mickey’s adventures by taking familiar characters and casting them in unfamiliar situations. In the wasteland world of Epic Mickey, many of Mickey’s best friends have been recreated as animatronic look-alikes.
Character artists/modelers then work with rigging to shape a 3D version. A character rig is an essential component of the process, since it dictates the actual in-game form of a character. “It’s the infrastructure, all the joints and bones,” Auburn explains. “At some game studios that I’ve worked at in the past, the animators also did the rigging. Thank goodness we’re not doing that here. These rigs are way too complex for us to do that. I’ve found that when you separate the roles, you get better results on both ends.”
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Caption: Many types of blotlings show up throughout the game, but the spatters shown here are the simplest and stupidest of the bunch. The artists have gone to great lengths to create numerous versions so they remain fresh whenever and wherever they show up in the game. Likewise, the animation team has built a wealth of short but amusing motions and actions for the little guys.
With a character like Mickey rigged up, the animators then have a “really cool puppet to play with,” as Auburn describes it. They can begin testing the character’s boundaries – how far can he stretch, what poses can he take, what emotions can he project given his facial structure, etc. With Epic Mickey, the animators have the advantage of decades of Disney animation to inspire and direct their choices. Mickey’s tradition also allows them to explore ideas that would be impossible in a more realistic setting. Many studios would have a hard time depicting a gritty space marine who can walk away from an anvil that drops on his head, but the animation team on Epic Mickey has the tools to pull it off, even if it mean days or even weeks of animation work to get the squashed and stretched version of the character to appear correctly after the anvil falls.
Pulling Together
Modern development studios can ill afford having departments working in isolation, and Junction Point is no exception. Throughout our visit, we witnessed the iterative process that interconnects different sections. The animators keep in constant contact with those implementing, playing, and testing the game. The artists respond to needs for new environments and characters as they emerge, requiring a constant effort throughout the development cycle.
If this iterative process succeeds, Epic Mickey could put the mouse back on the map. Modern 3D techniques finally allow for the team at Junction Point to present a Mickey Mouse game with the cartoon sensibilities that have been present in his films for decades. Colorful, humorous characters fill the cast, and the environments pull inspiration from classic Disney iconography. Simultaneously, the game introduces a dark and twisted element to Mickey’s world that stands in sharp contrast to his normal environs. It’s a visual framework primed to catapult him back into stardom.
If the process behind the art and animation for Epic Mickey has captured your interest, you'll want to explore our two videos on the subject, Sketching Mickey: The Time Lapse Video, and our video montage of The Art of Epic Mickey. For more on the real-life story of Mickey Mouse, you might enjoy Rise of an Icon: A Pictorial History of Mickey Mouse. Or, for a menu of all our Epic Mickey coverage, visit our landing page for the game, and check out the November 2009 issue of Game Informer magazine.
Want to see everything in greater detail? Make sure and click on the images in the gallery below for full size versions of all the images from this article.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz0S7PJWDnk&translated=1
(Design and Layout By Meagan VanBurkleo)
An In Depth Look at the Art and Animation
Disney Epic Mickey is months away from release, but the work involved in its creation began years ago. Anyone who has perused the November 2009 issue of Game Informer understands the project’s dramatic scope and ambition. However, we can only fit so much information in the magazine. In our first Inside the Game online feature, we follow the art and animation development from concept to implementation to get a better sense of how Mickey and his world came to life. Don’t miss your first-ever chance to see early animation tests of Mickey and his friends in action.
The World
Caption: Even a small section or level takes many steps to emerge into gameplay. In Epic Mickey, special 2D side-scrolling levels interconnect the larger 3D areas. Every one of these 2D images is based on an old Disney cartoon classic. This area was based on Clock Cleaners, a 1937 cartoon starring Mickey, Donald, and Goofy. Using scenes from the original as inspiration, the team creates a colored concept art piece to illustrate the idea of the level. Designers work together with the artists to shape the level, and indicate the motions of the many cogs, gears, and platforms in the scene. With those directions in hand, the team can implement a three-dimensional, functional version. Finally, Mickey can jump into action and the level can begin being tested and modified.
The process of level creation begins as a collaborative project; as the development team throws around ideas for game design and story the artists begin work on concept art in earnest.
“It starts on paper with the general idea of the storyline that Warren [Spector] is going for,” explains art director Lee Harker. “We read on paper the general gist of what the level or the area is supposed to be, and we just start firing off ideas all over the place. At that point Warren will come by and we’ll review the work and talk about general direction that we want to go for in each of these areas. Once we nail in on something, it’s just a matter of refining it and refining it until we have it just right.”
Caption: Concept art serves a far more important role than being inspirational imagery or fodder for magazine articles. Good concept art can help guide or inform the development of an entire stage of the game.
From early on, the game featured story elements that emerged from the history of Mickey Mouse, which the art needed to reflect. “You’ve got this wealth of subject matter out there that’s known all around the world and respected by so many people. It’s just an honor to be able to work with that, and it’s a big responsibility as well,” Harker admits. “You’ve got to continue on top of all these great artists that have come before you and build off of it.”
The Brave Little Tailor
Caption: The style of the cartoon and inert objects in the world shouldn’t be difficult to spot, thanks to clever visualization by Junction Point. Toon objects can be created and erased by the player; inert objects are permanent and real, and double as a way to put limits on the shape of the world.
While the concepts embraced the long history of a beloved character, Spector’s vision for the game took Mickey in a new direction. Much of that tonal shift was established under the eye of Rolf Mohr, the visual development director on the project in its early days.
“I look at our game even now a while out from shipping – I’m prejudiced obviously – but I think it looks fantastic,” Warren Spector tells us. “I gave Rolf a nearly impossible task. I said, ‘We’re creating a world where we have to have this painted, bright, cartoony, puffy marshmallow look side-by-side with this gray, blasted, dark, twisted, pointy, inert look.’” The resulting art style that Mohr and the rest of the team created was a mix of aesthetics, using familiar visual cues of colors and angles to help gamers immediately identify the different objects and creatures on screen.
Caption: Early in the game, Mickey finds himself under examination in the Mad Doctor’s lab. The original version of this lab was nearing completion when members of the art team became increasingly dissatisfied with their first attempt. Much of the lab level was scrapped, and a new version was developed over several weeks and put into place. “It just became apparent that we could really do a whole lot better,” art director Harker says. “So the team decided they wanted to take that on themselves, and they pretty much lived here for three weeks to get it right on their own.”
With the art style established, concept artists begin their work in earnest. In the case of Epic Mickey, the art team maintains a constant contact with the level design team. It’s an essential cooperation, since the central gameplay mechanic revolves around a paintbrush that can paint in and erase elements of the world as a player moves through the game. “If you look at the cartoon stuff in the world, all of that is supposed to be stuff players can affect,” Harker explains. “So that ties directly into the game’s design. You can’t have it be a complete free-for-all where we just put colorful cartoon stuff everywhere, and that mucks up the design where you’re able to access areas that the designers don’t want you to.”
Swinging into Action
Caption: These three simple images illustrate the central gameplay mechanic of Epic Mickey. Paint is used to fill in blank, glittering spaces, and thinner can erase objects. At times, players can erase sections of an object, utilizing the new shape of the object as a platform to ascend to a different location. In many ways, the game aims to let the player design his or her own path through a level. From an art perspective, objects like this bookshelf pose unique challenges. Not only must the object be interesting to look at, but also it also must be an integrated part of the level design.
Environment artists take the concept art and integrate it into a 3D framework through an imaging program called Maya. The environment team then changes size and shape of objects in a way that helps guide the players through the world. The level designers continue to contribute the necessary elements so the levels emerge as engaging and fun playgrounds. By this point, the designers and other parts of the development team can jump into a rough version of an environment and begin playtesting. But to do so, another major component has to be progressing at the same pace – characters.
Caption: Dozens of images from multiple artists help to establish the look, color, lighting, and overall vision for a given level. If you’ve spent any time at Disneyland, you’ll also notice how much the Gremlin Village has in common with the “It’s a Small World” attraction.
Characters and Animation
By necessity, the character artists need to stay one step ahead of those working on the environments and levels. “They’ve got to have the characters done in time to get them to the animators. So we want those guys way out in front,” Harker says.
Caption: Character artists on Epic Mickey begin with numerous exploratory sketches that establish the overall style for a character. If they have an existing reference, they work off of that as a starting point. In the case of the Mad Doctor, the artists looked back to the 1933 cartoon in which he first appeared. After sketches, the team creates colored character images and passes them off to be rendered in 3D.
The character artists’ most important focus is obviously Mickey, as players constantly interact with him. Dozens of versions of Mickey Mouse are created and scrapped, exploring any number of ways to interpret the classic character. At times, these new versions are elongated and modern, and at other times they stay as close as possible to older interpretations of the character. As of now, the team has settled on a colorful version of Mickey that reflects how he appeared in the 1930s – mischievous and cartoony. However, Spector demands a character that alters in response to player actions, so the character art team must create three Mickeys – a dark scrapper, a middle-of-the road version, and a heroic version. Each one poses differently and looks different, and the distinction needs to be sharp enough for players to recognize at a glance.
Caption: “How you decide to play the game should make a difference. You get to determine what kind of hero you are. Everybody solves the problem. Everybody saves the day. Everybody gets to save the world and gets the girl,” Warren Spector tells us, in regards to the shifting spectrum of play styles that change the appearance of Mickey throughout the game. “But how you do it, and how you end up looking is up to you. What abilities you have is up to you. Who likes you is up to you. What missions you hear about or not is up to you.” Each version of Mickey has a distinct look crafted by the character artists at Mickey, from the crouching and feral scrapper to the stalwart hero.
Even after a nearly complete version of Mickey is ready to go, the character artists have plenty of work to do right through the end of the project. New characters are added all the time, but the goal is to give more complicated and important characters the attention early, as they will be the ones that have the most complex and involved animation sets to complete.
Caption: Junction Point has developed a brand new antagonist to fit into Disney lore. The beetleworx are built by the Mad Doctor, and they act as a maintenance crew to the game world. Unlike many potential enemies in the game, they can’t be fully erased by Mickey’s magic paintbrush, so the art team had an interesting challenge to overcome: shape a potential enemy formed of both sharp, inert objects and marshmallowy cartoon shapes. Their solution lay in pulling together elements from across the familiar Disney theme park landscape and combining them on top of a metallic framework. Careful viewers will see elements from across Disney fiction combined together on this figure.
Animators keep in close contact with the character artists long before they begin bringing them to life. “We don’t want to overcomplicate things, but we also want to make sure that when the animation finally gets to us, all our needs can be met, and that we’re not creating something that’s going to be a problem down the road,” explains lead animator Jorma Auburn. The goal is to keep the character artists in the loop on what requires time and energy to animate and compute. “If it is going to be an ambient creature, and you want to have a lot of them on the screen, then having a bug with 20 legs is not the way to go,” Auburn says.
Caption: Warren Spector hopes to reinvigorate Mickey’s adventures by taking familiar characters and casting them in unfamiliar situations. In the wasteland world of Epic Mickey, many of Mickey’s best friends have been recreated as animatronic look-alikes.
Character artists/modelers then work with rigging to shape a 3D version. A character rig is an essential component of the process, since it dictates the actual in-game form of a character. “It’s the infrastructure, all the joints and bones,” Auburn explains. “At some game studios that I’ve worked at in the past, the animators also did the rigging. Thank goodness we’re not doing that here. These rigs are way too complex for us to do that. I’ve found that when you separate the roles, you get better results on both ends.”
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Caption: Many types of blotlings show up throughout the game, but the spatters shown here are the simplest and stupidest of the bunch. The artists have gone to great lengths to create numerous versions so they remain fresh whenever and wherever they show up in the game. Likewise, the animation team has built a wealth of short but amusing motions and actions for the little guys.
With a character like Mickey rigged up, the animators then have a “really cool puppet to play with,” as Auburn describes it. They can begin testing the character’s boundaries – how far can he stretch, what poses can he take, what emotions can he project given his facial structure, etc. With Epic Mickey, the animators have the advantage of decades of Disney animation to inspire and direct their choices. Mickey’s tradition also allows them to explore ideas that would be impossible in a more realistic setting. Many studios would have a hard time depicting a gritty space marine who can walk away from an anvil that drops on his head, but the animation team on Epic Mickey has the tools to pull it off, even if it mean days or even weeks of animation work to get the squashed and stretched version of the character to appear correctly after the anvil falls.
Pulling Together
Modern development studios can ill afford having departments working in isolation, and Junction Point is no exception. Throughout our visit, we witnessed the iterative process that interconnects different sections. The animators keep in constant contact with those implementing, playing, and testing the game. The artists respond to needs for new environments and characters as they emerge, requiring a constant effort throughout the development cycle.
If this iterative process succeeds, Epic Mickey could put the mouse back on the map. Modern 3D techniques finally allow for the team at Junction Point to present a Mickey Mouse game with the cartoon sensibilities that have been present in his films for decades. Colorful, humorous characters fill the cast, and the environments pull inspiration from classic Disney iconography. Simultaneously, the game introduces a dark and twisted element to Mickey’s world that stands in sharp contrast to his normal environs. It’s a visual framework primed to catapult him back into stardom.
If the process behind the art and animation for Epic Mickey has captured your interest, you'll want to explore our two videos on the subject, Sketching Mickey: The Time Lapse Video, and our video montage of The Art of Epic Mickey. For more on the real-life story of Mickey Mouse, you might enjoy Rise of an Icon: A Pictorial History of Mickey Mouse. Or, for a menu of all our Epic Mickey coverage, visit our landing page for the game, and check out the November 2009 issue of Game Informer magazine.
Want to see everything in greater detail? Make sure and click on the images in the gallery below for full size versions of all the images from this article.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz0S7PJWDnk&translated=1
(Design and Layout By Meagan VanBurkleo)
23 Ottobre - Un'intervista con Warren Spector
Spoiler
Upon our visit to Junction Point to learn about Epic Mickey, we had the opportunity to sit down for an extended conversation with Warren Spector. We tapped his expertise on Disney and Mickey Mouse, asked him all about his new game, found out what he thinks it will take to revitalize the character of Mickey Mouse, why he chose the Wii, and even what other Disney dream project he’d like to tackle. If you’ve been following our coverage of the game, you’ll recognize some of his words from other articles. To get the full scoop, read ahead for our complete interview.
GI: What do you think the significance of the Mickey Mouse character is in relation to film history and animation history?
Warren Spector: Mickey is critical to both animation history and film history. He was absolutely and demonstrably the most recognizable and popular film star in the world for about three or four years in the early ‘30s. He was huge at the box office. It’s not an overstatement to say that he gave hope to an entire generation of people living through the Depression. He was a little ray of sunshine. He seems kind of sweet and innocent, and his films don’t seem as anarchic and crazy and maybe relevant as today’s films do, but at the time it was exactly what the country needed, what the world needed. So he was there to provide it.
Just in terms of animation, he also represents a push for quality and for characterization and for story over gags – that was entirely new to cartoons. No one had ever really done that before. It’s actually not that completely accurate to say that he was the first sound cartoon character, but he’s the one that got in peoples’ heads first, and that means he’s the most important star of the talking pictures. You can argue that in 1928 when Steamboat Willie came out as the first sound synched cartoon that people were really aware of, Al Jolson was making the Singing Fool, which was a crummy old silent film style – and I mean, I love Al Jolson, and I love that movie, and there are probably five fans out there that are going to be offended now, but – he showed that sound film could be an art form in the same way that silent films were. Huge, hugely important.
GI: What made those early Disney cartoons stand apart from the crowd? Animation was growing big at that point in general. What made Disney’s stuff work and take on that status that you’re talking about?
WS: The thing that I think set Disney apart more than anything else was his unwavering commitment to quality. He would not cheap out on anything. Animation at that point was this little backwater. No one cared about it. There were Felix the Cat cartoons, and some others. There were some cartoon characters who had some popularity back then, but they were really quickly thrown together, kind of haphazardly, slapdash things that nobody cared about. Disney really paid attention. He focused on quality.
He lost Oswald because he refused to compromise on budget. That was the fundamental issue. He wanted more money to make better cartoons, and his distributor wouldn’t give it to him. So they fired him, found somebody who would do it cheaper, and guess what? Nobody remembers Oswald after Disney stopped doing him. So unwavering commitment to quality, that’s number one.
Number two was he moved beyond just gag, gag, gag, which is what the earlier cartoon shorts were. It’s not that Disney skimped on the gags. I mean, he paid his animators by the gag. It’s not like he wasn’t thinking about that stuff, but he really brought a level of character and story to short cartoons that no one had ever seen.
GI: How do you see the character of Mickey Mouse having changed over the years? Were there particular eras that you identify in the character’s life?
WS: Yeah, there were definitely distinct periods in Mickey’s life. There’s a wonderful poster of all of the different major eras of Mickey. We’ve got it up on the wall, actually. I don’t know who owns the rights to that. It’s a great poster.
There’s that early phase where he was a rat. There’s just no two ways about it. He was a guy who smoked and drank and shot guns and skewered people with swords and threw Minnie Mouse out of a plane when she wouldn’t kiss him and abused farm animals. He was a badly behaved little guy. As he became more popular, I think Walt started saying, “Let’s make this guy more realistic. Oh, we don’t want to do things with this guy that the world isn’t going to like,” so they started taming him and taking different parts of his personality. I’m about to get really pretentious – he was like this fully individuated ego. Jung would have loved Mickey Mouse.
But at some point they fractured his personality. They took his mischievousness and his anger and need for revenge and gave it to Donald. At some point they took his naïve simplicity and gave it to Goofy. They took his loyalty and infinite affection and gave it to Pluto, of all things. They took his character and just shattered it, and all of a sudden he’s kind of a straight man for the gang. So there’s that middle period where they kind of lost some of what made him special. He stopped being Douglas Fairbanks the adventurer or even Charlie Chaplin the humor guy, and they turned him into just the straight guy.
GI: When was this period? When do you see this change first happening?
WS: I think you start to see it by the early ‘30s. By 1932, that was well under way. He was created in 1928, and he had a three or four year run of being this amazing character that I think even if kids watched that cartoon, if they could stand to watch something in black-and-white, I think they’d really get a kick out of it and be amazed at how badly behaved Mickey was.
But by the early ‘30s, though he was no less popular – I mean, he was absolutely beloved in ’32, ’33; that was his peak right there – but by that point he had kind of become the straight man. And then toward the end of the ‘30s, it looks to me from the outside that they were trying to bring back some of the adventurous spirit that he had. By the ‘40s, they were doing things like Brave Little Tailor and that kind of stuff. They tried to get it back, but they just couldn’t take any risks with the guy. He was so successful and so popular that taking any risks with him risked the entire future of the company. Who’d be crazy enough to do that? Wait, other than me. No one’s nutty enough to do that.
By the ‘40s, he was already kind of on the wane. If you look at it, Donald Duck was way more successful by the ‘40s. There were lots more Donald cartoons. By the ‘40s, Mickey was appearing as a secondary character in Pluto cartoons for the most part. Goofy and Donald were doing their solo thing. I think in 1952 they did “The Simple Life.” That was Mickey’s last cartoon for about 35 years. It was kind of over. He was an icon on a watch, on a t-shirt.
There have been attempts to bring him back. “Run-Away Brain” in 1995 – I loved that cartoon. I don’t understand why people at Disney don’t like it. I think it’s brilliant. It’s a fantastic cartoon. But other than that, there’s “The Three Musketeers.” I dunno. “The Christmas Carol.” Eh. They didn’t know what to do with him anymore. He’s kind of been laying fallow, which is a great opportunity for us.
GI: Is there something in particular that you see Mickey needing to do to speak to a modern audience? What does Mickey bring to the table for somebody in 2009 or 2010?
WS: The irony is I think the best way to rejuvenate or revitalize the character, whether in a game or in a movie or anywhere else, is to return him to his roots. Not the ‘50s suburban uncle, not the ‘40s trying to make him a little more adventurous, not the ‘30s leader of the gang, but go back to those late ‘20s, early ‘30s cartoons where he was mischievous. Mischievous is the nice way to put it. He was a badly behaved mouse. He was a troublemaker. He was always doing bad stuff.
And honestly? I think kids grow up too fast now. They’re not going to settle for naïve, low-key humor – they’re not going to go for that. They want something more energetic, they want to act out. And Mickey used to be a character who they could sort of say, “He’s acting out for me,” and I think he could do that again. I also think the pace of old movies – the average shot length in classic Hollywood was about 30 seconds, and now it’s about six. So I think you need to pick up the pace; people need a faster pace. Unless you’re Pixar – Pixar gets away with it, it’s amazing; they can do this slow, languorous stuff and people love it. But if you’re trying to appeal to the kids who should love Mickey and the young adults who are out there watching MTV, I think you’ve got to pick up the pace. So get back to the roots, pick up the pace, be badly behaved; I think that’s what it’s going to take.
GI: Let me switch gears from the history of Mickey to the project itself; how did the game get started?
WS: It’s an amazing story how this happened. I left Ion Storm in 2004, and I had a Non-Compete so I had to sort of not work for awhile, and I put together all these plans, and I had a couple of game proposals that I was shopping around. And I’m almost ashamed to say, I have an agent – Seamus Blackley at CAA [Creative Artists Agency] is my agent – and he was taking me around to all these publishers and we were pitching projects, and he said, “You should talk to Disney.” And I said, “Disney’s not going to be interested in the stuff I’m pitching.” And he said, “No, no, no, you should talk to them; they’re changing.” And so we went to Disney and sure enough, I’m out there pitching an epic fantasy roleplaying game – a game that’s sort of Deus Ex like, but with a more militaristic spin, and really dark and really, really edgy and stuff – and of course they weren’t interested, you know? But I see all these guys – all the Disney execs are sitting around the table, and they’ve got their Blackberrys out and they’re checking their mail and stuff. And so I thought, “Oh, I’ve lost them. I’m going to kill Seamus when I get out of here, because I told him this was going to happen.”
And it turns out that what was going on – it wasn’t that – I mean they weren’t interested in the projects I was doing, but they were actually texting each other to see if they should ask me about this other thing they wanted done. And they asked if I would be interested in doing a licensed project. And I said, “Yeah, I’ve been wanting to do one.” I gave the design keynote at GDC in 2003 or 2004, about licenses and sequels, and how you can do creative stuff in that context. And so I was like, “Yeah! Give me Uncle Scrooge! Give me Duck Tales! Come on!” And I had a proposal that I wasn’t pitching that day, but I wanted to do a Night Stalker game, a monster of the week – what if monsters really existed in the world. And they weren’t interested in that, but they said, “What do you think about Mickey Mouse? Would you be interested in doing a Mickey Mouse game?” And I said, “No!” Because I don’t do games for kids and – it was really funny, I said – this is a quote – “You’ve done an incredibly good job of making Mickey lame and irrelevant to anybody over the age of eight over the last thirty years. I don’t do games for kids.” And they said, “No, no, no!” It was really magical, they said, “We want someone to reinvigorate this character, reinvent this character.” And I’m sitting there going, “Ooh! Disney fan, loves Mickey Mouse, reinvent character. Ooh – make character relevant to a 21st century audience. Ooh, that could be impossible.” And I mean literally, I said, “You know, this is probably impossible, we’re probably going fail. I’m in.”
And so at that point they called in Luigi Priore, who was running the think tank at Disney, which I guess a bunch of interns would come in and work up concepts and everything. And he gave me a pitch on a Mickey project that they had been working on, and I sat there and I watched this Powerpoint presentation that he did – and it’s like, “Holy cow, that is the heart of an amazing game.”
GI: So they were pitching it as a game at the time? Or just a more general –
WS: No, they had a game pitch. And that almost never works; coming up with a game idea at a publisher and then just finding a developer to do it – I don’t think that works particularly well – I don’t think it works well often, let’s put it that way. But they just happened to find – I feel like I’m talking about myself in the third person – but they happened to find the one guy who’s fanatical about this stuff, and there was the heart of this great idea. I mean there was Oswald in that pitch, and I think the Phantom Blot was in that pitch – we have changed everything, And they were saying, “Now you don’t have to do this, you can do whatever you want with this character, you can do whatever you want with this game!” And I said, “Why would I – I’m going to use that as my starting point. I’d be crazy – it’s a terrific idea, let’s go!”
And that’s kind of how it started. I came back here and said, “Guys, we now have two projects we’re working on” – there was another one that I can’t talk about unfortunately; we were working with another entity let’s just say, on some stuff; we did some concept development for someone else. And while the bulk of the team was doing that, I got together with a writer/designer friend of mine and a programmer, both of whom are still here, and we spent three or four months working up a proposal, and brought it back to Disney, and they loved it. And there’s a lot more history in there which we can talk about if you’re interested, but the rest is history.
GI: At some point the ties with Disney were formalized. Did that happen early on?
WS: Here’s the story; we spent probably four or five months developing the idea, and I presented it, and everybody seemed to love it. And then it was like, OK – I was invested, I had to do this game, I mean I had to do the game. And they said, “OK, the way you get to do the game is if we acquire your studio.” And I was already working on other stuff – I had a bunch of really cool stuff that someday I’ll be able to tell you about – and I was sitting there going, “Well, I don’t want to sell the studio [laughing].” I like being independent – I left Ion Storm and Eidos so I could make my own mistakes, right? But we did some negotiating, and we couldn’t reach an agreement. So at the end of the day they put an offer on the table to acquire the studio and I said no.
So we parted ways for a year, year and a half – I don’t know. And then the guy who was running development at Disney Interactive came to me after this year, year and a half – and I assumed it was dead and I was never going to get to do it. He called me up and said, “Can we talk?” And I said, “No, I’ve got another deal, I’m working on other stuff.”And he said, “Let me fly down tomorrow, and we’ll talk.” And he flew down here the next day, and to make a long story short, it was still I become a part of Disney; that’s the only way I get to make the game, they weren’t going to let me do it as an independent. But this time we reached an agreement – and I always wanted to work for Disney anyway; when I graduated from college, I got Disney stock; that was my present. And I wanted to be an Imagineer. So this was – at the end of the day I just said, “Well, I can always do another startup if this doesn’t work out; I want to make this game so bad I can taste it, so let’s do it.” So there it is. Oh, the timing on that was in early 2007, February 2007, and I think it was June at E3, we signed – they set up a press conference to announce this, and I had not signed the acquisition papers, or my personal services agreement… And so – you were there…
PR: Yeah, I’m just – the high level of it is that the deal got signed like, right at the start of the press conference.
WS: I mean literally I was standing outside on the steps with with a pen and a contract, and I had my phone to my ear and I was talking to my lawyer with one hand, and I was talking to my agent with the other hand, and it’s like there are 300 journalists in there, or 50 journalists, I don’t know –
PR: Oh no, the room was packed…
WS: The room was packed – there was a little video that was going to play; I finally said, “OK, I’m trusting you guys.”
It was a crazy day. And the thing was – like I said, it was announced – I was working with John Woo on a modern day ninja game; we had a movie deal and a game deal, and these characters that I had created with him, and this world that I created, I was walking away from it – honestly, I was crying, I mean I – these characters I created, someone else is going to get to mess with them now. And it was very hard to walk away from that, but – it’s Mickey… How many times in your life are you going to get the chance to play with an icon? It just doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen.
GI: I think a lot of people are familiar with the work you’ve done on your previous games, and as you’ve mentioned before there’s certain ideas that kind of unite some of those games, and certain themes that run through, and certain design values that have shown up in a number of games that you’ve worked on. Do you see any particular design values or game play values from your other games that have made their way into Epic Mickey?
WS: Oh yeah. It’s funny, one of the things I was really worried about when I agreed to do this game, was how am I going to recruit – because my assumption was that people would want to come here because they played Ultima games and they loved the Avatar and Britannia and stuff – and I worked with Richard Garriott on a bunch of those, and did a bunch of Ultima games on my own – and so that’s part of what people think of. And you know, Deus Ex: guy with a trench coat, two guns, sunglasses at night, sort of real world stuff – anyway to make a long story short, I worried about recruiting, but I finally just realized that the context, the fiction, is really secondary. I love telling stories, but what’s really more important to me is collaborating with players and the telling of those stories. And all of the core game play values, the things that I think make games important, and make games different – they can be expressed in any fictional context; they can be expressed in the context of a funny game or a sad game, or a scary one. Or a realistic science fiction game, or a hardcore fantasy game, or a cartoon game; those values of creating problems that players can solve however they want, showing them the consequences of the choices they make – that’s not fiction based, that’s game based. So all of it, everything I think is important is going to be expressed in this game – or else… I don’t know if the “or else” is addressed at me or Disney or the team, but it’s all *** well going to be there. I have no interest in making games that don’t do that. None.
GI: So the idea of choice is really central to any game that you’d work on?
WS: Yeah.
GI: Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of game play. What do you see as the central game play mechanic of the game?
WS: The central game play mechanic of Disney Epic Mickey is paint and thinner. It’s basically drawing and erasing; it’s making the world whole, or making it go away. And that’s part of a – over the last five or ten years I’ve been feeling really constrained by the fact that game designers – we build sets. We build things where if you scratch an inch below the surface, there’s nothing there; if you peek behind the walls you see that they’re flats held up with 2x4s. I came into this business, I started out – we create worlds in our heads, right? When we play tabletop roleplaying games, that’s what they’re all about; it’s visualizing and making this world real in your imagination. And one of the things that really attracted me to Origin and Richard Garriott, was we create worlds. That was Origin’s motto, and I mean I get chills just thinking about it now – I believe that stuff; we create worlds. And I look around and there aren’t enough people creating worlds anymore. And so I wanted to create – of all the games I was pitching since I left Ion Storm, were about creating a world that was more than a movie set, where you could scratch beneath the surface and there was more going on there. And so this whole paint and thinner mechanic really plays into that because you can dynamically change the world to suit your needs. So dynamically changing the environment to solve problems is kind of what it’s about.
GI: What’s the setting for the game?
WS: The Mickey game is set in the world called the Wasteland, which is a land of forgotten and rejected Disney creativity. The backstory fiction is Walt Disney couldn’t throw anything away – the archives are evidence of that – and if he couldn’t throw like a piece of paper away, how could he bear for the fruits of his imagination and his animators’ imaginations, and the Imagineers’ imaginations – how could he bear to see that just lost forever? So the power of that idea, “I must never lose these characters or these rides, or anything,” led to the creation of this alternate universe, which is this limbo world where forgotten and rejected characters, theme park rides, scenes from movies that never got made – scenes that didn’t fit into movies that did get made – background paintings, character costumes from the park that got moth-eaten – designs for garbage cans for crying out loud, you know? All of that stuff – where does it go when the world rejects it or when its time has passed? It goes to the Wasteland. And when the world is ready to re-embrace those things – when the world is ready for the flying saucers ride at Disneyland, gosh darn it, it’s coming out of the Wasteland and it will be there. And when the world is ready for Oswald? He comes out, like he is now. And when the world is ready for a reinvigorated Mickey Mouse? What better way than to have him come back out of the Wasteland? So that’s kind of the setting.
GI: Certainly there are a lot of things about that world that set it apart from what we’re used to seeing from Mickey Mouse cartoons – do you have a general way of describing the tone of the world and the characters we see there?
WS: It’s dark and twisted, that’s kind of what it’s about. I want people to have – as they play the game and they look at things, and they move through spaces and they listen to the soundtrack – I want them to have this feeling of recognition and familiarity, and then I want to yank the rug out from under them. I want them to feel like, “You know, I’ve been here before but – no, I really haven’t. I’ve heard that song... no, that’s different.” So there’s that moment of recognition, and then there’s the shock that something’s different. That’s kind of what I’m hoping for.
On top of that, I really want to scare kids. I’m gonna keep saying that until I’m blue in the face. It’s going to be a funny game. Honestly, I bet a lot of fans are really gonna be upset with me about this, but I really want to do something lighter. I don’t want to do dark and heavy. I want people to smile when they’re playing, not get all scrunched up with adrenaline. I want people to smile when they’re playing a damned game for a change. This seems like a perfect opportunity to do that, but thrown in there every once in a while, there’s going to be an “Oh my god!” scare. That’s what I’m shooting for. We’ll see if I succeed. That’s a tough thing – funny and then scary. But we know Disney can do it, so we’ll see if we can do it in a game.
GI: Why the Wii?
WS: Well, think about it. Would you really want to tackle convincing Halo or Grand Theft Auto players that they want to be Mickey Mouse? Would you really want to do that? In terms of finding a congenial audience, let’s go for a platform that’s known for Mario and Link and now Sonic. Come on. Honestly, with the unit sales on the hardware, it was kind of a lucky happenstance. We made the call to go to the Wii long before it was clear that the Wii was going to be, at least for now, the best-selling platform.
It was about going where the audience is and going somewhere where they’re going to accept a visual style that is more cartoony than people are used to seeing and where we don’t feel obliged to throw in every shader on the planet. “Look at the normal maps and shaders.” We don’t have to do that kind of stuff. It’s the right platform for this project, for sure.
GI: Who or what is the Phantom Blot?
WS: The Phantom Blot was created by Floyd Gottfredson who is probably the second greatest comic book writer and artist of all time after the sainted Carl Barks who did all those Uncle Scrooge stories that I love so much. In 1939 or ’40, Gottfredson created the Phantom Blot as a villain to face off against Mickey in a comic book. You know, I love Floyd Gottfredson, I really do, but wow, the Phantom Blot is a lame villain. He’s a guy in a black sheet who robs cameras. He steals peoples’ cameras. Mickey the detective has to solve the problem. He’s appeared over and over again.
It’s kind of weird that we’re considering him a forgotten character, because he actually still shows up in comic books and he’s appeared in two TV episodes. But I thought we’ve got to take this thing as a tribute to Floyd Gottfredson, we’ve got to turn this guy into something big and scary and worthy of Mickey. We’ve re-envisioned him pretty dramatically as a creature of paint and thinner and corruption. That’s the way I describe him to the team. He’s an interesting character. He’ll be troubling Mickey for a while, I suspect.
GI: What do you consider will make the game a success? What for you would make it a success?
WS: The number one thing I want to see happening, I want to go on the forums and have some gamer – this is probably not Disney’s goal for the game, this is my goal for the game – I want to go on the forums on the Game Informer website, and I want to hear somebody say, “Mickey Mouse is lame! You’re playing a mouse, you moron!” and just have everyone in the world jump on him. “No, Mickey Mouse is cool! What are you talking about?! Play the game! Shut up!” I want to see people going out there and saying, “I want to be Mickey Mouse,” not just wearing a Mickey Mouse watch or t-shirt. I want people saying, “I want to be Mickey Mouse.”
I want to go to Disneyland or Disneyworld and see the Wasteland ride. That’s another little mark I’ve got to check off on my resume. I’ve got to create a theme park ride. I’ve got to do that. I really want there to be a theme park ride. I want to be in a park.
And I want to make a movie. As much as I love telling stories with players, there is so much to this story that is going to be frankly very hard to express in an interactive context. There is a feature-length film to be made out of this that would rock peoples’ worlds. I want to see that movie get made too. I need to make a movie. That’s the other thing on my resume that I haven’t checked off. Those two things, and then I’ll be good to go. I’ve played music in front of paying people, I’ve written a novel, I’ve made 19 games, this will be my 20th. I work for Disney. I’ve got to produce a movie, and I’ve got to design a theme park ride.
Also, I want to do a Duck Tales game. Convince the world that a Duck Tales game needs to be made. I can’t convince anybody at Disney to let me do a Duck Tales game. How can that be?
GI: Everybody I know, when you ask about the cartoons that they are fond of from childhood, there’s that varying list of all the action ones, the G.I. Joes and the Transformers and the Thundercats and all that stuff, but everybody loves Duck Tales.
WS: Carl Barks really is the greatest American comic book writer and artist ever. Some people would say Will Eisner. There’s competition. But Carl Barks is the best, and he wrote and drew the stories that inspired half of those Duck Tales episodes, and they are watered down. You would not believe the beauty and the power of those stories. They’re not for kids. They’re really very adult or certainly appealing to the broadest possible audience, which is kind of where I want to be now. I don’t want to make games for kids, I don’t want to make games for gamers, I want to make games for everybody. I think if someone did Carl Barks or Duck Tales right, it would be awesome. Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge were Indiana Jones 50 years before Indy was a glimmer in Spielberg’s eyes. It’s just amazing, and they’re doing nothing with him right now.
GI: You can make that happen.
WS: Yeah, we’ll see. That’s a big organization to buck.
GI: But once you do Mickey, it all opens up, doesn’t it?
WS: We’ll see. I hope you’re right.
Upon our visit to Junction Point to learn about Epic Mickey, we had the opportunity to sit down for an extended conversation with Warren Spector. We tapped his expertise on Disney and Mickey Mouse, asked him all about his new game, found out what he thinks it will take to revitalize the character of Mickey Mouse, why he chose the Wii, and even what other Disney dream project he’d like to tackle. If you’ve been following our coverage of the game, you’ll recognize some of his words from other articles. To get the full scoop, read ahead for our complete interview.
GI: What do you think the significance of the Mickey Mouse character is in relation to film history and animation history?
Warren Spector: Mickey is critical to both animation history and film history. He was absolutely and demonstrably the most recognizable and popular film star in the world for about three or four years in the early ‘30s. He was huge at the box office. It’s not an overstatement to say that he gave hope to an entire generation of people living through the Depression. He was a little ray of sunshine. He seems kind of sweet and innocent, and his films don’t seem as anarchic and crazy and maybe relevant as today’s films do, but at the time it was exactly what the country needed, what the world needed. So he was there to provide it.
Just in terms of animation, he also represents a push for quality and for characterization and for story over gags – that was entirely new to cartoons. No one had ever really done that before. It’s actually not that completely accurate to say that he was the first sound cartoon character, but he’s the one that got in peoples’ heads first, and that means he’s the most important star of the talking pictures. You can argue that in 1928 when Steamboat Willie came out as the first sound synched cartoon that people were really aware of, Al Jolson was making the Singing Fool, which was a crummy old silent film style – and I mean, I love Al Jolson, and I love that movie, and there are probably five fans out there that are going to be offended now, but – he showed that sound film could be an art form in the same way that silent films were. Huge, hugely important.
GI: What made those early Disney cartoons stand apart from the crowd? Animation was growing big at that point in general. What made Disney’s stuff work and take on that status that you’re talking about?
WS: The thing that I think set Disney apart more than anything else was his unwavering commitment to quality. He would not cheap out on anything. Animation at that point was this little backwater. No one cared about it. There were Felix the Cat cartoons, and some others. There were some cartoon characters who had some popularity back then, but they were really quickly thrown together, kind of haphazardly, slapdash things that nobody cared about. Disney really paid attention. He focused on quality.
He lost Oswald because he refused to compromise on budget. That was the fundamental issue. He wanted more money to make better cartoons, and his distributor wouldn’t give it to him. So they fired him, found somebody who would do it cheaper, and guess what? Nobody remembers Oswald after Disney stopped doing him. So unwavering commitment to quality, that’s number one.
Number two was he moved beyond just gag, gag, gag, which is what the earlier cartoon shorts were. It’s not that Disney skimped on the gags. I mean, he paid his animators by the gag. It’s not like he wasn’t thinking about that stuff, but he really brought a level of character and story to short cartoons that no one had ever seen.
GI: How do you see the character of Mickey Mouse having changed over the years? Were there particular eras that you identify in the character’s life?
WS: Yeah, there were definitely distinct periods in Mickey’s life. There’s a wonderful poster of all of the different major eras of Mickey. We’ve got it up on the wall, actually. I don’t know who owns the rights to that. It’s a great poster.
There’s that early phase where he was a rat. There’s just no two ways about it. He was a guy who smoked and drank and shot guns and skewered people with swords and threw Minnie Mouse out of a plane when she wouldn’t kiss him and abused farm animals. He was a badly behaved little guy. As he became more popular, I think Walt started saying, “Let’s make this guy more realistic. Oh, we don’t want to do things with this guy that the world isn’t going to like,” so they started taming him and taking different parts of his personality. I’m about to get really pretentious – he was like this fully individuated ego. Jung would have loved Mickey Mouse.
But at some point they fractured his personality. They took his mischievousness and his anger and need for revenge and gave it to Donald. At some point they took his naïve simplicity and gave it to Goofy. They took his loyalty and infinite affection and gave it to Pluto, of all things. They took his character and just shattered it, and all of a sudden he’s kind of a straight man for the gang. So there’s that middle period where they kind of lost some of what made him special. He stopped being Douglas Fairbanks the adventurer or even Charlie Chaplin the humor guy, and they turned him into just the straight guy.
GI: When was this period? When do you see this change first happening?
WS: I think you start to see it by the early ‘30s. By 1932, that was well under way. He was created in 1928, and he had a three or four year run of being this amazing character that I think even if kids watched that cartoon, if they could stand to watch something in black-and-white, I think they’d really get a kick out of it and be amazed at how badly behaved Mickey was.
But by the early ‘30s, though he was no less popular – I mean, he was absolutely beloved in ’32, ’33; that was his peak right there – but by that point he had kind of become the straight man. And then toward the end of the ‘30s, it looks to me from the outside that they were trying to bring back some of the adventurous spirit that he had. By the ‘40s, they were doing things like Brave Little Tailor and that kind of stuff. They tried to get it back, but they just couldn’t take any risks with the guy. He was so successful and so popular that taking any risks with him risked the entire future of the company. Who’d be crazy enough to do that? Wait, other than me. No one’s nutty enough to do that.
By the ‘40s, he was already kind of on the wane. If you look at it, Donald Duck was way more successful by the ‘40s. There were lots more Donald cartoons. By the ‘40s, Mickey was appearing as a secondary character in Pluto cartoons for the most part. Goofy and Donald were doing their solo thing. I think in 1952 they did “The Simple Life.” That was Mickey’s last cartoon for about 35 years. It was kind of over. He was an icon on a watch, on a t-shirt.
There have been attempts to bring him back. “Run-Away Brain” in 1995 – I loved that cartoon. I don’t understand why people at Disney don’t like it. I think it’s brilliant. It’s a fantastic cartoon. But other than that, there’s “The Three Musketeers.” I dunno. “The Christmas Carol.” Eh. They didn’t know what to do with him anymore. He’s kind of been laying fallow, which is a great opportunity for us.
GI: Is there something in particular that you see Mickey needing to do to speak to a modern audience? What does Mickey bring to the table for somebody in 2009 or 2010?
WS: The irony is I think the best way to rejuvenate or revitalize the character, whether in a game or in a movie or anywhere else, is to return him to his roots. Not the ‘50s suburban uncle, not the ‘40s trying to make him a little more adventurous, not the ‘30s leader of the gang, but go back to those late ‘20s, early ‘30s cartoons where he was mischievous. Mischievous is the nice way to put it. He was a badly behaved mouse. He was a troublemaker. He was always doing bad stuff.
And honestly? I think kids grow up too fast now. They’re not going to settle for naïve, low-key humor – they’re not going to go for that. They want something more energetic, they want to act out. And Mickey used to be a character who they could sort of say, “He’s acting out for me,” and I think he could do that again. I also think the pace of old movies – the average shot length in classic Hollywood was about 30 seconds, and now it’s about six. So I think you need to pick up the pace; people need a faster pace. Unless you’re Pixar – Pixar gets away with it, it’s amazing; they can do this slow, languorous stuff and people love it. But if you’re trying to appeal to the kids who should love Mickey and the young adults who are out there watching MTV, I think you’ve got to pick up the pace. So get back to the roots, pick up the pace, be badly behaved; I think that’s what it’s going to take.
GI: Let me switch gears from the history of Mickey to the project itself; how did the game get started?
WS: It’s an amazing story how this happened. I left Ion Storm in 2004, and I had a Non-Compete so I had to sort of not work for awhile, and I put together all these plans, and I had a couple of game proposals that I was shopping around. And I’m almost ashamed to say, I have an agent – Seamus Blackley at CAA [Creative Artists Agency] is my agent – and he was taking me around to all these publishers and we were pitching projects, and he said, “You should talk to Disney.” And I said, “Disney’s not going to be interested in the stuff I’m pitching.” And he said, “No, no, no, you should talk to them; they’re changing.” And so we went to Disney and sure enough, I’m out there pitching an epic fantasy roleplaying game – a game that’s sort of Deus Ex like, but with a more militaristic spin, and really dark and really, really edgy and stuff – and of course they weren’t interested, you know? But I see all these guys – all the Disney execs are sitting around the table, and they’ve got their Blackberrys out and they’re checking their mail and stuff. And so I thought, “Oh, I’ve lost them. I’m going to kill Seamus when I get out of here, because I told him this was going to happen.”
And it turns out that what was going on – it wasn’t that – I mean they weren’t interested in the projects I was doing, but they were actually texting each other to see if they should ask me about this other thing they wanted done. And they asked if I would be interested in doing a licensed project. And I said, “Yeah, I’ve been wanting to do one.” I gave the design keynote at GDC in 2003 or 2004, about licenses and sequels, and how you can do creative stuff in that context. And so I was like, “Yeah! Give me Uncle Scrooge! Give me Duck Tales! Come on!” And I had a proposal that I wasn’t pitching that day, but I wanted to do a Night Stalker game, a monster of the week – what if monsters really existed in the world. And they weren’t interested in that, but they said, “What do you think about Mickey Mouse? Would you be interested in doing a Mickey Mouse game?” And I said, “No!” Because I don’t do games for kids and – it was really funny, I said – this is a quote – “You’ve done an incredibly good job of making Mickey lame and irrelevant to anybody over the age of eight over the last thirty years. I don’t do games for kids.” And they said, “No, no, no!” It was really magical, they said, “We want someone to reinvigorate this character, reinvent this character.” And I’m sitting there going, “Ooh! Disney fan, loves Mickey Mouse, reinvent character. Ooh – make character relevant to a 21st century audience. Ooh, that could be impossible.” And I mean literally, I said, “You know, this is probably impossible, we’re probably going fail. I’m in.”
And so at that point they called in Luigi Priore, who was running the think tank at Disney, which I guess a bunch of interns would come in and work up concepts and everything. And he gave me a pitch on a Mickey project that they had been working on, and I sat there and I watched this Powerpoint presentation that he did – and it’s like, “Holy cow, that is the heart of an amazing game.”
GI: So they were pitching it as a game at the time? Or just a more general –
WS: No, they had a game pitch. And that almost never works; coming up with a game idea at a publisher and then just finding a developer to do it – I don’t think that works particularly well – I don’t think it works well often, let’s put it that way. But they just happened to find – I feel like I’m talking about myself in the third person – but they happened to find the one guy who’s fanatical about this stuff, and there was the heart of this great idea. I mean there was Oswald in that pitch, and I think the Phantom Blot was in that pitch – we have changed everything, And they were saying, “Now you don’t have to do this, you can do whatever you want with this character, you can do whatever you want with this game!” And I said, “Why would I – I’m going to use that as my starting point. I’d be crazy – it’s a terrific idea, let’s go!”
And that’s kind of how it started. I came back here and said, “Guys, we now have two projects we’re working on” – there was another one that I can’t talk about unfortunately; we were working with another entity let’s just say, on some stuff; we did some concept development for someone else. And while the bulk of the team was doing that, I got together with a writer/designer friend of mine and a programmer, both of whom are still here, and we spent three or four months working up a proposal, and brought it back to Disney, and they loved it. And there’s a lot more history in there which we can talk about if you’re interested, but the rest is history.
GI: At some point the ties with Disney were formalized. Did that happen early on?
WS: Here’s the story; we spent probably four or five months developing the idea, and I presented it, and everybody seemed to love it. And then it was like, OK – I was invested, I had to do this game, I mean I had to do the game. And they said, “OK, the way you get to do the game is if we acquire your studio.” And I was already working on other stuff – I had a bunch of really cool stuff that someday I’ll be able to tell you about – and I was sitting there going, “Well, I don’t want to sell the studio [laughing].” I like being independent – I left Ion Storm and Eidos so I could make my own mistakes, right? But we did some negotiating, and we couldn’t reach an agreement. So at the end of the day they put an offer on the table to acquire the studio and I said no.
So we parted ways for a year, year and a half – I don’t know. And then the guy who was running development at Disney Interactive came to me after this year, year and a half – and I assumed it was dead and I was never going to get to do it. He called me up and said, “Can we talk?” And I said, “No, I’ve got another deal, I’m working on other stuff.”And he said, “Let me fly down tomorrow, and we’ll talk.” And he flew down here the next day, and to make a long story short, it was still I become a part of Disney; that’s the only way I get to make the game, they weren’t going to let me do it as an independent. But this time we reached an agreement – and I always wanted to work for Disney anyway; when I graduated from college, I got Disney stock; that was my present. And I wanted to be an Imagineer. So this was – at the end of the day I just said, “Well, I can always do another startup if this doesn’t work out; I want to make this game so bad I can taste it, so let’s do it.” So there it is. Oh, the timing on that was in early 2007, February 2007, and I think it was June at E3, we signed – they set up a press conference to announce this, and I had not signed the acquisition papers, or my personal services agreement… And so – you were there…
PR: Yeah, I’m just – the high level of it is that the deal got signed like, right at the start of the press conference.
WS: I mean literally I was standing outside on the steps with with a pen and a contract, and I had my phone to my ear and I was talking to my lawyer with one hand, and I was talking to my agent with the other hand, and it’s like there are 300 journalists in there, or 50 journalists, I don’t know –
PR: Oh no, the room was packed…
WS: The room was packed – there was a little video that was going to play; I finally said, “OK, I’m trusting you guys.”
It was a crazy day. And the thing was – like I said, it was announced – I was working with John Woo on a modern day ninja game; we had a movie deal and a game deal, and these characters that I had created with him, and this world that I created, I was walking away from it – honestly, I was crying, I mean I – these characters I created, someone else is going to get to mess with them now. And it was very hard to walk away from that, but – it’s Mickey… How many times in your life are you going to get the chance to play with an icon? It just doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen.
GI: I think a lot of people are familiar with the work you’ve done on your previous games, and as you’ve mentioned before there’s certain ideas that kind of unite some of those games, and certain themes that run through, and certain design values that have shown up in a number of games that you’ve worked on. Do you see any particular design values or game play values from your other games that have made their way into Epic Mickey?
WS: Oh yeah. It’s funny, one of the things I was really worried about when I agreed to do this game, was how am I going to recruit – because my assumption was that people would want to come here because they played Ultima games and they loved the Avatar and Britannia and stuff – and I worked with Richard Garriott on a bunch of those, and did a bunch of Ultima games on my own – and so that’s part of what people think of. And you know, Deus Ex: guy with a trench coat, two guns, sunglasses at night, sort of real world stuff – anyway to make a long story short, I worried about recruiting, but I finally just realized that the context, the fiction, is really secondary. I love telling stories, but what’s really more important to me is collaborating with players and the telling of those stories. And all of the core game play values, the things that I think make games important, and make games different – they can be expressed in any fictional context; they can be expressed in the context of a funny game or a sad game, or a scary one. Or a realistic science fiction game, or a hardcore fantasy game, or a cartoon game; those values of creating problems that players can solve however they want, showing them the consequences of the choices they make – that’s not fiction based, that’s game based. So all of it, everything I think is important is going to be expressed in this game – or else… I don’t know if the “or else” is addressed at me or Disney or the team, but it’s all *** well going to be there. I have no interest in making games that don’t do that. None.
GI: So the idea of choice is really central to any game that you’d work on?
WS: Yeah.
GI: Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of game play. What do you see as the central game play mechanic of the game?
WS: The central game play mechanic of Disney Epic Mickey is paint and thinner. It’s basically drawing and erasing; it’s making the world whole, or making it go away. And that’s part of a – over the last five or ten years I’ve been feeling really constrained by the fact that game designers – we build sets. We build things where if you scratch an inch below the surface, there’s nothing there; if you peek behind the walls you see that they’re flats held up with 2x4s. I came into this business, I started out – we create worlds in our heads, right? When we play tabletop roleplaying games, that’s what they’re all about; it’s visualizing and making this world real in your imagination. And one of the things that really attracted me to Origin and Richard Garriott, was we create worlds. That was Origin’s motto, and I mean I get chills just thinking about it now – I believe that stuff; we create worlds. And I look around and there aren’t enough people creating worlds anymore. And so I wanted to create – of all the games I was pitching since I left Ion Storm, were about creating a world that was more than a movie set, where you could scratch beneath the surface and there was more going on there. And so this whole paint and thinner mechanic really plays into that because you can dynamically change the world to suit your needs. So dynamically changing the environment to solve problems is kind of what it’s about.
GI: What’s the setting for the game?
WS: The Mickey game is set in the world called the Wasteland, which is a land of forgotten and rejected Disney creativity. The backstory fiction is Walt Disney couldn’t throw anything away – the archives are evidence of that – and if he couldn’t throw like a piece of paper away, how could he bear for the fruits of his imagination and his animators’ imaginations, and the Imagineers’ imaginations – how could he bear to see that just lost forever? So the power of that idea, “I must never lose these characters or these rides, or anything,” led to the creation of this alternate universe, which is this limbo world where forgotten and rejected characters, theme park rides, scenes from movies that never got made – scenes that didn’t fit into movies that did get made – background paintings, character costumes from the park that got moth-eaten – designs for garbage cans for crying out loud, you know? All of that stuff – where does it go when the world rejects it or when its time has passed? It goes to the Wasteland. And when the world is ready to re-embrace those things – when the world is ready for the flying saucers ride at Disneyland, gosh darn it, it’s coming out of the Wasteland and it will be there. And when the world is ready for Oswald? He comes out, like he is now. And when the world is ready for a reinvigorated Mickey Mouse? What better way than to have him come back out of the Wasteland? So that’s kind of the setting.
GI: Certainly there are a lot of things about that world that set it apart from what we’re used to seeing from Mickey Mouse cartoons – do you have a general way of describing the tone of the world and the characters we see there?
WS: It’s dark and twisted, that’s kind of what it’s about. I want people to have – as they play the game and they look at things, and they move through spaces and they listen to the soundtrack – I want them to have this feeling of recognition and familiarity, and then I want to yank the rug out from under them. I want them to feel like, “You know, I’ve been here before but – no, I really haven’t. I’ve heard that song... no, that’s different.” So there’s that moment of recognition, and then there’s the shock that something’s different. That’s kind of what I’m hoping for.
On top of that, I really want to scare kids. I’m gonna keep saying that until I’m blue in the face. It’s going to be a funny game. Honestly, I bet a lot of fans are really gonna be upset with me about this, but I really want to do something lighter. I don’t want to do dark and heavy. I want people to smile when they’re playing, not get all scrunched up with adrenaline. I want people to smile when they’re playing a damned game for a change. This seems like a perfect opportunity to do that, but thrown in there every once in a while, there’s going to be an “Oh my god!” scare. That’s what I’m shooting for. We’ll see if I succeed. That’s a tough thing – funny and then scary. But we know Disney can do it, so we’ll see if we can do it in a game.
GI: Why the Wii?
WS: Well, think about it. Would you really want to tackle convincing Halo or Grand Theft Auto players that they want to be Mickey Mouse? Would you really want to do that? In terms of finding a congenial audience, let’s go for a platform that’s known for Mario and Link and now Sonic. Come on. Honestly, with the unit sales on the hardware, it was kind of a lucky happenstance. We made the call to go to the Wii long before it was clear that the Wii was going to be, at least for now, the best-selling platform.
It was about going where the audience is and going somewhere where they’re going to accept a visual style that is more cartoony than people are used to seeing and where we don’t feel obliged to throw in every shader on the planet. “Look at the normal maps and shaders.” We don’t have to do that kind of stuff. It’s the right platform for this project, for sure.
GI: Who or what is the Phantom Blot?
WS: The Phantom Blot was created by Floyd Gottfredson who is probably the second greatest comic book writer and artist of all time after the sainted Carl Barks who did all those Uncle Scrooge stories that I love so much. In 1939 or ’40, Gottfredson created the Phantom Blot as a villain to face off against Mickey in a comic book. You know, I love Floyd Gottfredson, I really do, but wow, the Phantom Blot is a lame villain. He’s a guy in a black sheet who robs cameras. He steals peoples’ cameras. Mickey the detective has to solve the problem. He’s appeared over and over again.
It’s kind of weird that we’re considering him a forgotten character, because he actually still shows up in comic books and he’s appeared in two TV episodes. But I thought we’ve got to take this thing as a tribute to Floyd Gottfredson, we’ve got to turn this guy into something big and scary and worthy of Mickey. We’ve re-envisioned him pretty dramatically as a creature of paint and thinner and corruption. That’s the way I describe him to the team. He’s an interesting character. He’ll be troubling Mickey for a while, I suspect.
GI: What do you consider will make the game a success? What for you would make it a success?
WS: The number one thing I want to see happening, I want to go on the forums and have some gamer – this is probably not Disney’s goal for the game, this is my goal for the game – I want to go on the forums on the Game Informer website, and I want to hear somebody say, “Mickey Mouse is lame! You’re playing a mouse, you moron!” and just have everyone in the world jump on him. “No, Mickey Mouse is cool! What are you talking about?! Play the game! Shut up!” I want to see people going out there and saying, “I want to be Mickey Mouse,” not just wearing a Mickey Mouse watch or t-shirt. I want people saying, “I want to be Mickey Mouse.”
I want to go to Disneyland or Disneyworld and see the Wasteland ride. That’s another little mark I’ve got to check off on my resume. I’ve got to create a theme park ride. I’ve got to do that. I really want there to be a theme park ride. I want to be in a park.
And I want to make a movie. As much as I love telling stories with players, there is so much to this story that is going to be frankly very hard to express in an interactive context. There is a feature-length film to be made out of this that would rock peoples’ worlds. I want to see that movie get made too. I need to make a movie. That’s the other thing on my resume that I haven’t checked off. Those two things, and then I’ll be good to go. I’ve played music in front of paying people, I’ve written a novel, I’ve made 19 games, this will be my 20th. I work for Disney. I’ve got to produce a movie, and I’ve got to design a theme park ride.
Also, I want to do a Duck Tales game. Convince the world that a Duck Tales game needs to be made. I can’t convince anybody at Disney to let me do a Duck Tales game. How can that be?
GI: Everybody I know, when you ask about the cartoons that they are fond of from childhood, there’s that varying list of all the action ones, the G.I. Joes and the Transformers and the Thundercats and all that stuff, but everybody loves Duck Tales.
WS: Carl Barks really is the greatest American comic book writer and artist ever. Some people would say Will Eisner. There’s competition. But Carl Barks is the best, and he wrote and drew the stories that inspired half of those Duck Tales episodes, and they are watered down. You would not believe the beauty and the power of those stories. They’re not for kids. They’re really very adult or certainly appealing to the broadest possible audience, which is kind of where I want to be now. I don’t want to make games for kids, I don’t want to make games for gamers, I want to make games for everybody. I think if someone did Carl Barks or Duck Tales right, it would be awesome. Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge were Indiana Jones 50 years before Indy was a glimmer in Spielberg’s eyes. It’s just amazing, and they’re doing nothing with him right now.
GI: You can make that happen.
WS: Yeah, we’ll see. That’s a big organization to buck.
GI: But once you do Mickey, it all opens up, doesn’t it?
WS: We’ll see. I hope you’re right.
26 Ottobre - Anatomia di un'immagine
Spoiler
28 Ottobre - Audio tuor con Warren Spector
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rT2-FOCHRA4
Howard:...Wow...assurdo.
Kreese:E IO DOVREI LEGGERE TUTTA QUELLA ROBA?MA TI SEI FO**UTO IL CERVELLO TENENDOLO SEMPRE IN QUEL CA**O DI CAPPELLO?!?
L'ARIA NON CI ENTRA,LA'?!?
Pit:Dai,Kreese,calma,mica lo devi leggere tutto.
Geno:Eh,appunto,puoi vedere ciò che vuoi.
Phoenix:Cioè,Professore,è più dettagliato questo di molti referti che ho visto in tribunale,giuro!
Layton:Lo so,lo so.
Il 28,giorno dell'ultimo aggiornamento,ci fu la famosa conferenza di presentazione...niente di nuovo,a parte...degli artwork per le altre aree,quando l'unica area di cui si era visto qualcosa era quella dei Gremlin.
Howard:Poi silenzio,e silenzio,e nessun'immagine...
Kreese:Ma è Disney o Nintendo?Cioè,l'item è lo stesso,porca tro*a...
Pit:*voleva dire iter:ricordalo e accettalo così,rimanda le pillole a qualcosa di più meritevole*Beh,in effetti,per certi versi,questo gioco SA di Nintendo,per il nome del creatore,per le risorse messe in campo...
Geno:Esatto:sin dall'inizio si diceva sarebbe stato un top game per Disney,importantissimo per loro,ma le immagini avevano lasciato molto a desiderare per la maggior parte degli utenti.
Phoenix:*prende un foglio alla sua maniera*Vedendo il forum,si nota come il silenzio sia continuato per mooooolto tempo,sino a poco prima l'E3,quando i giornalisti hanno immortalato i banner presenti alla fiera.
Layton:Mr.Wright,io purtroppo non ricordo che ci siano stati banner alla fiera...vorrei una prova che mi faccia ricredere a riguardo.
Gli altri cinque:*ma lo fa apposta,e si diverte sotto come un idiota,lo sappiamo!*
Layton:Allora,mr.Wright?Può dimostrarmi che ci furono banner all'E3 di qualche mese fa?
Howard:Dai,Phoenix,è facile.
Kreese:Ci riuscirebbe anche un bambino in pannolino,daaaiii...
Pit:Cioè,ci riusciresti anche tu?
Geno:Grande battuta,bravo!Batti cinque!
Phoenix:*mi dicono che è facile,ma come mai sono così sicu...MA CERTO!sul forum e su Neogaf!*
ECCO!
Banner dell'E3
Spoiler
Layton:...Wow,bravo,specialmente rapido.Ottimo,davvero una gran bella presentazione prima dell'inizio ufficiale dell'E3.E poi,Epic Mickey venne mostrato nella conferenza Nintendo,con un Reggie che,stranamente,si è anche esibito in una gaffe,dicendo "Disney's Epic Disney" che ancora oggi mi diverte abbastanza.Veste molto migliorata,un nuovo scenario,un pò di cut-scene...e la magia si sentiva già.
Demo alla conferenza Nintendo dell'E3 2010
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jZgMA5f7ZQ
Ed eccoci qua,da qui in poi è stato un continuo crescendo di hype,tramite immagini,video,servizi e ricordi su ricordi.
Adesso,questo gioco è magia che si sente nell'aria.Non ho altro da aggiungere.
Howard:Beh,a questo punto,tanto vale andare con le immagini e i trailer,no?
Kreese:OBIEZIONE!...Sì,lo volevo fare anch'io per una volta,ca**o.
Pit:...Bravo,per una volta hai fatto bene!Ragazzi,e le info?Non abbiamo ancora dato info sul gioco in se.
Geno:Ah,capito,e avete ragione.
Phoenix:Uh,è vero
Layton:S-s-ono un pò stupito...hai visto ciò che mancava nella nostra disamina generale,bravo.*detto con un pò di rabbia dentro per essere stato corretto da un tipo simile*
Andiamo con le info,poi si va di immagini e trailers!
Howard:Wow...bravo Kreese,per una volta,bravo!
Kreese:*meglio non dire che volevo dire OBIEZIONE! a ca**o e basta,ci faccio una meglio figura...*
Pit:Bene,allora andiamo con...ALT!FERMI TUTTI!
Geno:No,anche tu a copiare,ora?
Phoenix:*non ho pace,oggi*
Layton:Signor Pit,qual è il problema?
Howard:Eh,appunto.
Kreese:Che minc*ia ti ha preso,stavolta,eh?
Pit:...eee...non ci entra più niente,qua.Dobbiamo usare un'altra pagina.
Geno:Aaaah,hai provato a postare altro,ma hai visto che tutto collassava,no?Ok,ok...continuiamo in un altro post...
Phoenix:Ok!
Layton:Tutti al secondo post,allora.