With Toy Story 3, Disney’s game division has made a huge wager that video games based on movies don’t have to suck.
For 2.5 years, Disney Interactive Studios has poured the talents of 180 game developers at its Avalanche Software game studio into making a series of titles that will run on eight major game platforms. After a long gestation, those games will get their test in the market on June 18, when they debut on the same day as the movie.
“We hope that we’ll redefine what a movie-based game can be,” said Graham Hopper, executive vice president and general manager of Disney Interactive Studios, in an interview at the Emeryville, Calif., headquarters of Disney-owned film maker Pixar Animation Studios. “It’s one of the most ambitious projects ever for a game that is based on a movie.”
Movie games have been cursed for a long time. Very few games based on movies have ever been critically claimed, and some, like the horrid Catwoman that had a bad game to go with an equally bad movie, have been financial disasters. By contrast, all 10 of Pixar’s movies have been hits, and Toy Story 3 is likely to be another blockbuster. Disney’s challenge is to transfer that excellent film discipline to its game division to come up with a better hit ratio. After working closely with Pixar’s team on the project, Disney’s team thinks it has done that.
On Thursday, Disney was confident enough about the game to invite the press into Pixar’s secretive headquarters in Emeryville, Calif., for a sneak peak. In the theater where we saw scenes from the upcoming film, Pixar Animation Studios executives talked about how they approached the game.
Toy Story debuted in 1995 and Toy Story 2 launched in 1999. But there was no rush to get the next one out, as Pixar launched one original film after another. The Toy Story 3 movie project finally gained steam just as Disney bought Pixar in 2006. Before that, THQ had made games based on Pixar’s movies. They sold well, but they weren’t considered great games. This time, Disney decided to have someone else make the game, and it organized a bidding contest.
Lee Unkrich, director of the film, gathered a bunch of game developers together to pitch the story of the movie to them in 2007. Inside Pixar’s movie theater, he held the developers spellbound as he described the movie and invited them to pitch a game. John Blackburn, head of Disney’s Avalanche Software, came back with a pitch that offered two different choices about how to make the game. One was a story-based game; the other was an open world where you could play with toys in a creative way, much the way kids use their own imagination when digging toys out of a toy box.
John Lasseter, the master storyteller behind Pixar’s movies and chief creative officer, suggested that they do both. Asked if the game should focus on a segment such as girls, Lasseter advised the team to make a game that the would love to play themselves. If they did, then the audiences would follow. Lasseter and Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar, decided to pick Avalanche Software.
“We saw that a story could be really powerful, but we knew that we didn’t want to just replay the story of the movie,” said Jonathan Warner, senior producer at Avalanche.
Avalanche went to work with a huge team to tackle both sides of the game, which the team hoped would appeal to hardcore gamers, kids and parents at the same time. Lasseter freed up Pixar’s staff to collaborate with developers, rather than just have his staff approve the game details. Pixar’s team helped educate the game developers on “truth in toys,” a concept used in the movies that required toys to always behave like toys. For instance, you can’t make Buzz Lightyear touch his hands over his head because his arms don’t move that way. And you have to have Ken and Barbie move in rather stiff-legged movements, because that’s the way they are as toys. Once the game developers understood the “truth in toys” concept, they could create their own toys for use in the game.
Luckily, no one tore up the script for Toy Story 3. Unkrich says that sometimes happens in other movies. But with this one, there was no restart. That meant that the game makers had time to work on a consistent idea and environment for a long time. Hopper said that the budget for the game was more than what is usually spent on movie games.
“The plot points stayed the same and that made our lives much easier,” said Blackburn.
They refined the ideas by testing them on kids. The team brought in more than 60 groups of parents and children to test different concepts. One kid was having a lot of fun tossing around a bendable toy cow in the game, to the exclusion of all else. The developers adjusted to that, creating a mission in the game where that’s pretty much all you do.
In the end, the goal of the movie and the game were the same. Both needed to show how fun and emotional it is when an imaginative kid creates an epic storyline using a simple set of toys as the main characters. In the game, you can play as the Buzz Lightyear, Woody, or Jessie characters. They deal with conflicts, such as when bandits try to rob the bank or steal cattle. Aliens from the film also make an appearance, stealing cattle and taking them off into space.
The result is a game where there is a lot of exploration, mixed with fulfilling missions. You might be doing six or seven missions at a time, since you can discover a bunch of things to do as you do your missions in the Toy Box.
“The Toy Box mode is the crowning achievement of the game,” Hopper said.