Warren Spector, Epic Mickey Interview

27 Aug 2010 at 10:00:03 by James Chalmers

When the game was announced it was said you were a Disney fan, has it always been part of your life?

I’ve been a Disney fan literally since the day I was born. My dad bought me a Pluto plush toy the day I was born and that set me off on the road to Disney fandom. There’s a picture of me when I was about nine months old, sitting in my Mom’s lap, wearing mouse ears. So she put me in mouse ears before I was a year old!

If you come to my office I’ll show you the Disneykins – the little Disney figures that I played with when I was a kid, which I still have and my personalised mouse ears that I got when I was about five. I have a bunch of mouse guitars, I used to play with my mouse guitar at home.

The first Halloween I remember, I dressed up as Zorro, which was an old Disney TV series. When I graduated from college I got Disney stock from my family.

When I was trying to decide what to do with my life, how do I get out of the tabletop game business and what do I do next - It was either make video games or become a Disney Imaginer. I applied for a job as an Imaginer, and made it through two rounds of phone interviews before Origin made me a job offer. All off a sudden I was making video games. I came ‘this close’ to becoming a Disney cast member about 30 years ago, so I’ve been a Disney fan a long time.

How did you come up with this idea? Did Disney come to you about a plan or did you go to Disney with the story?

Disney approached me, which was incredibly flattering to say the least. The way it happened was that I created Junction Point and I was making the rounds of publishers trying to find someone to fund one of the games I wanted to do. My agent said, “lets go talk to Disney”, I said I loved Disney, but they’re not going to be interested in M-rated science fiction games, M-rated fantasy role playing games and that’s kind of what I wanted to do. He said, talk to them anyway, they’re changing.

So we took a meeting, and I was pitching my fantasy and science fiction stuff, and predictably enough they weren’t interested. But they asked me if I was interested in doing a Mickey Mouse game, because they had a concept. There’s a thing called the Think Tank at Disney Interactive. They’d come up with this idea for a Mickey Mouse game, and they pitched me on it and said, would I be interested in taking this concept and turning it into a game. I said, yes that’s fantastic. It was a terrific idea.

They came and asked me if I was interested, and the core of the concept came from the Disney think tank, a lot of creative people. I look at it as if they gave me an acorn, and I was damn well going to be the guy who grew that into a tree. I was going to make an oak tree out of that acorn. Ideas are the easy part of the business, I don’t mean to demean what the think tank did but, they had a great kernel of an idea, and my team has turned it into something really special.

So even though it’s very different from your usual outings, it wasn’t a hard sell then?

I’ve been a Disney fan all my life. I’ve taught animation history classes at the University of Texas. I got my Masters degree writing about ‘toons, which gave the graduate school a big laugh. They all laughed when they opened the title page on my thesis.

I’ve been a cartoon fan all my life. Here’s the critical bit : a lot of people, gamers and a lot of journalists look at this and go completely different, “he’s not doing a game about guys who wear trench coats and sunglasses at night and carry two guns”. But what I always tell the team that I’m working with and what I tell publishers and myself is, the idea that play style matters, that idea of choice and consequence and engaging players in collaborative storytelling process, that has nothing to do with your fiction. Nothing to do with your world, it has nothing to do with your hero.

I think if Deus Ex fans will give this a chance they’ll find a lot of gameplay which is familiar and appealing. The way I look at it is if you’re willing to spend 10, 20 hours of your life being a little plumber and wearing a funny hat, or you’re willing to be a blue hedgehog for 10 hours of your life, be a mouse and come tell a story with me. I think it’ll work out just fine.

Is it hard to create a Disney game that is aimed to suit everybody?

There’s certainly a perception that Mickey is for kids. It’s funny because you see famous Hollywood actresses wearing Disney couture now. So there’s a level that even adults get Disney. One of the big surprises for me after I joined Disney was, I even came to do it with the idea that it was a company that made entertainment for kids, but its really everybody sort of has this attitude about lets make entertainment for families, for everyone. I think that’s kind of cool. I came in as a guy who makes games that have always reached an older audience. Even when the average gamer was 15 yrs old, my games were selling to 20 -23 yr olds. Once we hit Deus Ex, the average age of people who played Deus Ex was 30. I’ve always reached an older audience; I know how to do that. I came into this thinking I have no idea how to reach kids, so maybe Disney will teach them something. They were thinking, we know how to reach kids, but this guy knows how to reach an older audience. So we’re either going to teach each other a lot, and make a game that reaches everybody, or we’re going to fail gloriously. I don’t know which way it’s going to go, but either way it’s been an amazing experience.

Will some of the current Disney cast appear to aid Mickey on his quest? If so who can we expect to see? If not why did you decide not to have cameo appearances for the game?

The cast is pretty broad in Disney. There was a temptation to use recent stuff and I decided not to do that. The whole point is its set in wasteland, a world of forgotten rejected character concepts and theme park rides that have been mothballed. That’s what the game is about. To some extent I wanted to stick with the old forgotten stuff, because its fun to remind people and even folks at Disney sometimes how rich their creative history is, so that’s been a big part of the appeal. 

The other thing is, this is on a personal level, I’ve got to know some of the people who work on some of the recent Disney films, and while I’m not going to name names, but there are some of the recent Disney animated films haven’t necessarily been quite at that Snow White level of quality. It’s not for me to say what’s going to have lasting value. 30 years from now people may look at something I don’t think is particularly great and go, “wow, that’s a high watermark for Disney”. I don’t want to be the guy who says, “that work you did 10 years ago, really not so good buster”, I don’t want to be that guy.

Also, what I discovered was there’s some films that I’m not crazy about. TV shows that I’m not crazy about, but we have a lot of families at Junction Point now and there are kids of Junction Point who love this stuff and I don’t want to tell them you shouldn’t like this thing that you watch 20 times a week.

Will we see any origin stories for some of the rejected characters by Disney? Will there be a part of the game that explains which Disney program they were designed for and why they were rejected?

There are a lot of ways we’re communicating the back-story of the forgotten characters. You’ll engage in conversations with many of the characters in the game. They will tell you a little something about themselves.

There are other ways of discovering things about the world. I like to let people discover for themselves, but we have a little character Gus the gremlin who is a real Disney character who has been completely forgotten since the 1940s. He’s been nowhere. He’s kind of your spirit guide, he’s your Jiminy Cricket. He tells you a little bit about what’s been going on, who these characters are. Part of the story is that poignant thing that Disney stories always have. Part of that is that Mickey’s even forgotten a lot of these characters and so he’s going to remember about the friends along with the players. The players on the same journey Mickey’s on, rediscovering Disney’s glorious past.

Do you think there’s going to be moments where you’re going to say, “oh, I haven’t seen him in ages, I remember him I used to watch him when I was a kid”?

If there aren’t moments where people go, “hey, I remember him from when I was a kid”, we’ll have failed absolutely. The point of this is I want players to go, “I’ve been there!.. no, I haven’t… I know that song,.. it sounds a little different.. oh, I remember.. but it looks different”. It’s familiar but different. The familiar made strange is what we’re going for.

Disney fans are going to have a heck of time playing the ‘where did that come from’ game. Almost everything in the game; the trashcans and light fixtures came from real Disney stock. They were inspired by things at theme parks or concept art from films. Almost everything is derived from something real. I fully expect players to go, “where did that come from?” and do some research and find out.

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