You can’t say “let the cat out of the bag” when you’re dealing with a Mouse. BTW, I am SO INSANELY EXCITED ABOUT THIS. I’ve been waiting 5 years to see this game come to light and to happily say that I had a small part of it, and now that it’s all over the web and Game Informer is doing an amazing job covering what the developers are doing, I think it’s fair to share the following tidbit about a little game they call Epic Mickey…
I interned with the first iteration of the BVG Think Tank in the summer of 2004, a video game concept development group comprised of paid undergraduate associates at The Walt Disney Company’s Buena Vista Games shingle (now called Disney Interactive Studios). Working here as a writer alongside a team of seven other interns, the Think Tank helped develop proposals to guide key decision makers and help Disney extend their reach with gamer culture. “Epic Mickey“, one of those proposals and an idea that we in the first Think Tank originally developed and pitched to Disney executives under the direction of BVG in-house developer and Think Tank creator Chris Takami, is currently being produced by Disney Interactive’s Junction Point Studios by award-winning game designer Warren Spector.
There you have it. I’m not going to say anything more about it because I’ve never been sued and I’d like to keep it that way. UPDATE: After some careful analysis of Game Informer’s interview with Warren Spector, there really isn’t much I could divulge – what we came up with is still basically intact. Chalk it up to paranoia. Now, the “how’s” and “why’s” would be a different story, I guess. Or not. Whatever.
Sigh. Now maybe some of my close friends will understand my obsession with the word ‘epic’. Incidentally, I latched on to the idea of what constitutes ‘epic’ by watching epic manuevers on YTMND.com. Can’t wait to play the game next year and hopefully perform some epic manuevers with Mickey on the Wii. Ahhhh, yeah.
Follow Up
Here’s a bit from Warren Spector’s Game Informer interview where he mentions how the game came about in 2004:
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.”
So, yeah, I was one of those interns. The eight of us came up with the original idea and first pitch for Epic Mickey. What I think is great about this story is that TWDC, Takami, Priore, and Graham Hopper (GM of BVG at the time) – and I’m sure countless other individuals in Disney’s rank and file – were so incredibly wise to run a Think Tank of college kids to begin with. Take a bunch of college kids, who are also people from the core demographic for the types of games BVG wanted to really get in to, and then just let us loose to create and develop, trusting that we knew what we wanted to see in a game. It would be so much fun for me, but I’m not sure if I’m allowed, to discuss exactly how we came up with the concept, the reasonings and logic involved. I mean, this wasn’t simply about making a Mickey Mouse game, but about how to make Mickey Mouse culturally relevant again. I say this because what I think is the very best thing about the way this Mickey game idea was realized, and how the Think Tank operated in general, was what each of us brought, in my opinion, what really special abilities each of my fellow interns brought to the table from an educational standpoint. I think this is a testament to the educations we were receiving from our respective colleges at the time we were in the Think Tank, be it USC (where I was finishing up, and I can tell you exactly how things I was learning from the Interactive Media Program and film school factor in to Epic Mickey), CalArts, the University of San Diego, and so forth. THAT’S what I think is most awesome about this, and why I’m making such a big deal out of connecting myself and the Think Tank to the project. I think some serious credit should be given to our educational experiences in addition to any personal, artistic, gaming, and cultural interests, in terms of how Epic Mickey came to be. I don’t know, and wouldn’t begin to imagine, that all of our ideas will be reflected in the final product, but I can see, and according to Spector’s interview this is true, that the heart of what we came up with is intact. That, to me, is really, really, really cool.
Taken as a whole, I feel like Epic Mickey is the product of a bunch of different generations listening to one another and saying, hey, I get it! That’s the most satisfying thing about this – I feel like someone finally listened to me. That’s epic in my book.
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Tags: Disney, epic, interactive design, Junction Point Studios, mickey mouse, video games, Warren Spector, wii