Warren Spector, gaming industry veteran behind Deus Ex and Epic Mickey (among others), is relaxed. Reclined in a bar overlooking Sydney’s Circular Quay, the Opera House looming large in the background, Spector shows no sign of fatigue from his long-haul flight the previous day, and any weariness he may have felt post-E3 is clearly long gone.
It’s quite the opposite, really; he’s a veritable packet of enthusiasm. Epic Mickey 2, coming to Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360, is his latest project and he’s very keen to talk about it.
He’s quick to explain just how he’d pitch Epic Mickey 2 to a PS3 or 360 owner understandably unfamiliar with the first.
“Well, what I’d say is, ‘Don’t worry about the fact that there’s a ‘2’ in the name’,” says Spector. “Since we were going for an audience that hadn’t played the first one we tried to make sure that it’s a standalone experience. So don’t worry about that, it tells its own story.”
“ You’re fine being a blue hedgehog, you’re fine being a fat little plumber.
“And then I’d say... ‘Okay, relax. Yes. It’s Mickey Mouse. Okay? You’re fine being a blue hedgehog, you’re fine being a fat little plumber, you’re fine being whatever that orange cat-like thing is that has a robot buddy. You’re really okay with all that stuff. Try being a mouse for a little while. It won’t hurt you.’
“And then I’d say, ‘Look I’ve made – I really have lost track, I’ve gotta go back and count, this is either my twenty-second or my twenty-third game, I really can’t remember which – and every one of them has been about the same thing at its heart, right? It’s about players making choices as they play, and then dealing with the consequences of those choices. It’s about you telling your story, not me telling mine. It’s about you. And, in that way, it’s just like Deus Ex. The content is a little different, I don’t deny that. The tone is a little different, I don’t deny that. But the heart of the gameplay is still about choice and consequence, which is what I’ve been doing since the 80s. So give it a shot; what’s the worst that could happen? We’re not curing cancer here; we’re making games, right? See if it’s fun for you.”
“I honestly never anticipated it to be a hurdle, and it wasn’t one, because I always just make the game I wanna play,” he says. “I never – I’m not kidding, nobody believes me when I say this – I’ve never been assigned a game, never been told to make a game. I’ve never made a change in a game based on focus testing except once and it was a mistake, I shouldn’t have done it.”
“ I’ve never been assigned a game, never been told to make a game.
“It was Deus Ex Invisible War, actually, we focus tested concepts and I was told, ‘Set the game further in the future and put the guy or the girl in a purple jumpsuit; people like purple jumpsuit. Why did I listen?”
Spector buries his face in his hands with a grin before continuing.
“But I’ve always made games that appealed to older audience and I didn’t see anything different here. I just made a game that I found interesting. I like Disney stuff. No-one looks at Toy Story and says,’ Oh, that’s just for kids.’ Why is it that games can only appeal to a certain audience, but movies and books – I mean, how many adults read Harry Potter?
“And so what we found, that didn’t surprise me in the least, was that – it’s such a precise number I feel almost silly saying it, but it’s true – 54 per cent of our buyers, of our players, on Mickey 1 were over 18. 39 per cent were under the age of 13.
So you’ve got the whole spread?
“Well, except for the seven per cent 13 to 17, but it’s like, no 13 to 17-year-old is going to admit that they like Mickey Mouse. It’s not gonna happen. I don’t even worry about that. We have a little hole in the middle of our audience but at the end of the day we made a game for everyone, in the same way that Pixar makes movies for everyone.”
“Dude, let me just explain something,” he laughs, shifting backwards in his seat. “The first time I went into the Disney archives – I’m sorry, not the Disney Archives, just the Imagineering part; there are seven, actually there are eight, I found the eighth mysterious archive about six months ago. I went into the Imagineering Archives and the guy I was working with there apologised to me that they had only scanned 90,000 images so far.”
“ I went into the Imagineering Archives and the guy I was working with there apologised to me that they had only scanned 90,000 images so far.
“The first time I went into the Animation Archive they said, ‘Well, what would you like to see?’ And I said, ‘Well, why don’t you just show me everything you’ve got on Alice in Wonderland’ – because at the time I was thinking about putting an Alice in Wonderland world in the game, which we eventually ended up cutting for a bunch of reasons.
“They just laughed at me: ‘You’re gonna have to narrow it down a little bit.’ Because the Disney archives, it’s 84 years of history. The one way in which I feel I’m a kindred spirit with Walt Disney is that neither one of us ever throws anything away. He never threw anything away. We could tell stories set in Wasteland right outta the Disney archives for the next 100 years and never run out of material. There’s no shortage of material, trust me.”
Source : ign[dot]com
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