Epic Mickey news roundup – Game was for PC/PS3/360 originally, MotionPlus talk more

All of the following information comes from Warren Spector…

“The reality is that we started Wii development in 2008, but before that we were a PC, PS3, and 360 title. It’s burned in my brain – Graham Hopper [Disney Interactive boss] pulled me into my office one day and said ‘What does it take to deliver on the goals we have for this product? And I said, well, you need enough time and enough money to be competitive. And it’d be awfully nice if we could focus on one platform. At that time we were talking about a Wii port and I was begging people – no, we can’t just port to the Wii, it’s not going to work. It needs to be its own game. A lot of the design ideas just won’t work on the Wii, we need to give the Wii its dues. Graham looked at me and said ‘What do you think about a Wii exclusive?’ And I went ‘Holy cow – yeah!’ They walked away from three other platforms – no other publisher on the planet would have done that. It was a magic moment for me. No-one has even mentioned other formats since that point.

“I think a lot of people missed the boat with Wii. I think a lot of people are enamoured with going ‘ooooh look shaders’. They like the idea of doing in real time what Pixar does with pre-rendered CGI. I guess it’s kind of natural that everyone always goes for the flashiest, glitziest, biggest hard drive sort of thing. But for me, I don’t know – I just look at Mario and Zelda and go to my friends: ‘where are the best games?’ Being able to focus on gameplay over flashy graphics is kinda nice – almost like the good old days of development. I mean that in an entirely positive way.”

“This is a labour of love for me. I’ve always been a Disney fan and I love Mickey – I love the character. It’s pretty obvious to anybody that looks at the character today in broad strokes what we need to do to bring him back to the top of the cartoon heap. In literally my first talks with Disney when they laid out their hopes for the project, we wanted to bring Mickey back to the world – to a whole new audience that doesn’t know him as a hero. And we want to bring him to gamers and make him a hero that they want to be.”

“We played with it [MotionPlus] and I think that it would be a great fit for our core mechanic, but the best I can say is that in the future we’d love to do more with it.

Source 1, Source 2, Source 3, Source 4