which will hit stores Nov. 30, is a labor of love for Disney superfan Spector, crafted with loving fidelity to the source material. But it’s also far more complex and serious than the average cartoon game. Spector says it’ll take three 20-hour playthroughs to see everything, since the game is full of serious moral choices and big decisions, a sort of BioShock for the whole family.

Appropriately enough, the seeds of Spector’s game design philosophy were planted with the adventures of a totally different mouse.

Twenty years ago, a 35-year-old Spector was holed up in Ultima creator Richard Garriott’s house, plotting out the gameplay of the sixth game in the seminal role-playing game series. Spector had spent some time at game-publishing company TSR creating pen-and-paper RPGs, but was a newcomer to videogame design with some perhaps overly ambitious ideas about player autonomy.

“We sort of had this rule that we were going to plan at least two ways of solving every puzzle in the game. That was our incredibly sophisticated approach to player choice,” he says.

There was just one puzzle that the old hand and the newbie couldn’t hack. Ultima players had to use a Telekinesis spell to get on the other side of a portcullis, then hit a lever to raise the game. Spector and Garriott hadn’t come up with an alternate solution. Or so they thought, as Spector watched a tester play the offending puzzle.

“I’m sitting here smugly thinking, ‘Oh yeah, you’re in a world of trouble, you’ve got to go get a Telekinesis spell.’ But instead what he did was, he had a character called Sherry the Mouse who was small enough to fit under the portcullis,” he said.

“I literally dropped to the floor,” he said. At that moment, Spector knew the kinds of games he wanted to make — the kind that creative players could break if they really wanted to.

“Player choice can result in things that the design team never even considered. That is gaming at its best,” he says.

Rejected By His Dad

On a chilly November morning, Spector and I sat in the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco for a look at the upcoming Fantasia Blu-ray release, onto which a small Epic Mickey preview had been tacked. But you get the sense that Spector would be here regardless. He’s one of the world’s biggest Disney enthusiasts, with an encyclopedic knowledge and a massive collection of memorabilia housed at Junction Point, his game design studio in Austin, Texas. Disney acquired Junction Point in 2007. The most thrilling part was when Spector got his “cast member” name tag.

If I had any doubt about Spector’s bona fides as a Disney superfan, they were erased after a brief trip to the museum’s gift shop, where he racked up a $300 tab in a few minutes. Lots of gifts for the folks back home, of course, but also stuff for his collection. Spector scooped $10 collector’s pins into his hands — “Do I have this one? I need that one….”

During our afternoon interview, he was still visibly beaming, having just met Diane Disney Miller, daughter of Walt Disney, this morning. Not only that, she even checked out his game.

“I don’t like videogames,” Miller told me later that day. “My grandsons play them, and they’re all violent, and I can ascribe a lot of today’s crime to brutal videogames.”

“And I always thought, why doesn’t the Disney company break the mold and do something that is playful and beautiful and fun, with a certain innocence. And they did,” she said. “When I saw Mickey scrambling through (the game’s levels), I thought, ‘Hey, that’s a really cute Mickey.’ I think it’s great. I’m quite excited for it.”

Spector says he’s happy to be making a game that can be enjoyed by kids, parents and hard-core gamers alike. “Why must games either be for children or for adolescent boys? Why? You tell me. I think it’s ridiculous,” he says.

“I’ve done a lot of near-future dystopic science fiction games now,” says Spector. “I’m really happy to be making a game that has a different approach.”

Epic Mickey might be family-friendly fun, but it’s also a somewhat darker take on Disney’s famous mouse.

“There are parts of this game that I find really sad,” Spector said. “There are a couple of places where people are going to cry. I really mean it when I say, if you’re going to have Mickey bring light to the world, we have to start with darkness. If you’re going to have joy, which there is much of at the end of the game, you have to have sadness.”

Mickey wanders through a land of forgotten cartoon characters, helping to restore the world using magic paint and thinner. Along the way, he meets up with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, one of Disney’s first cartoon creations, which became the property of Universal until Disney got him back in 2006. It was losing the rights to make Oswald cartoons that caused Disney to come up with Mickey in the first place.

“It was a cold-hearted business transaction: ‘We own the rights to Oswald, we’re taking your staff, we’re making Oswald cartoons, you’re out,’” said Spector. “That’s why Mickey was created.”

“Dad never talked about Oswald,” said Diane Disney Miller. “Once they lost him, they just put him out of their minds and they went on.”

Disney’s daughter said she was impressed with the way Junction Point integrated Oswald’s real-life history into the game’s plot. “I thought it was very sweet, very clever,” she said. “It’s like ancient history and mythology and all that.”

“That was the heart of the story for me,” said Spector. “Oswald, rejected by his dad.”

To Save a Gremlin

Controlling Mickey along his travels, the player will have to make all sorts of choices during the game. As in role-playing games like Fable and Dragon Age, a player’s choices and actions will determine some of how the rest of the adventure plays out.

“We’ve had to train players. There are a lot of people (who) haven’t played Peter Molyneux’s games, the BioWare games and all that stuff,” says Spector. “They need to be trained that they don’t have to do everything, they can do things the way they want, and be careful because what you do has meaning, has consequences.”

So, at the onset of the game, Spector says, the team “set up the silliest choice you could possibly have, which is you can either get a treasure, making you richer and more powerful, or you can free a trapped Gremlin. And you can’t have both, which one do you want?”

What Spector should have known is that at one point, a tester would figure out a way to get the treasure and save the Gremlin. Spector’s carefully planned tool to teach players that they would have to give up some things was found to have a hole in it, and the gamemaker could not have been happier.

“For almost any other developer, that’s a bug. For me, it’s a celebration,” he said.

See Also:

• Video: Epic Mickey: Oswald Featurette
• Video: Epic Mickey's Playful Approach to Videogame Storytelling
• Behind the Scenes: Disney Epic Mickey Videogame

Authors: Chris Kohler

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