Where did the idea for Disney Infinity first come from and what was the first concept?
John Day: Disney Infinity really started as part of Toy Story 3. If you’re familiar with Toy Story 3 the video game, it had a toy Box mode in it. It wasn’t nearly as extensive as this, but the idea behind the toy box in Toy Story 3 that we really expanded on here was, we wanted to recreate the experience of playing with toys on the lounge room floor. You dump out all of your toys from your basket or your box and it didn't matter which place that they were from or which world they were from, but they played together and you kind of made up the rules as you went and you made up your own story. We wanted to give you everything you needed to do the same thing here and then bring to bear all of the powerful properties that Disney has, to kind of add into that. So you can now have your favorites toys from The Incredibles and Pirates (of the Caribbean) and Cars and bring all those things together, so it was really “Let’s play with toys, just like we used to play with toys”.
But within a video game?
John Day: Right, in a video game. That was the very genesis and of the figures. Just as we had finished Toy Story 3, so this was about 2010, early 2010, we were talking to John Lasseter, who’s the former president of Pixar, he’s now the Creative Director of Walt Disney Company, and said “Ok. This is what we did with Toy Story 3″, which we did a really close collaboration with Pixar and this is what we wanted to do with it next. John Lasseter is a huge toy geek, his office is floor to ceiling toys, he loves his toys.
He’s the Pixar and Disney guy so he has to love that stuff.
John Day: Right? His first major motion picture was Toy Story. He loves toys and he said “I can just imagine a line of toys that is a associated with the video game. Actual physical toys that are collectible, I can put them on my shelf. That would be so great. What can we do there?” And sooner than later we ended up with actual toys that are part of the game and are game pieces that you need. That’s kind of how everything got started years ago.
From memory, I’m pretty sure that the toy box mode was what everybody loved about it most, from all the reviews I remember reading that was the most popular thing.
John Day: Yeah that was a surprise to a lot of people, especially from a licensed game. They were like “We’re not used to seeing this kind of thing out of a licensed game.” It was the beginning of what you see here.
Has it changed much from that? When did the idea of play sets come into the picture?
John Day: We knew that we wanted to mix and match everything. In Toy Story 3, everything was part of Toy Story and so we didn’t really have a lot of conflicting opinions on how to treat the properties. There were those that really wanted to see their properties, preserved and maintained in kind of their atmosphere. The Incredibles live in this particular world and we were asked “Can’t we show more of that world?” and we said “Sure we can”. So we made the play sets and for people that want to experience more of a fiction and more of a universe and they want to have an experience that’s already built for them, so they don’t have to build everything themselves, the play sets are a great solution.
So you get the best of both worlds?
John Day: Exactly. Just like you’ll recall in Toy Story 3, we had the toy box mode and a story mode that you kind of play the story from the film. When we had pitched them to Lasseter we said “We have two ideas for how we can do Toy Story. One is this toy box mode, where you build everything and it’s kind of open. But if you want something a little more what you’re used to where we show more of the movie and you play through the story and its more story driven, we can do that as well”. And John Lasseter said “Why don’t we just do both of these things?” So, we are now accustomed to just doing both. Ever since then. So we just did both the play sets and the toy box.
What were the challenges in creating that unified look that feels organic for all of the properties to come together and play together?
John Day: Well we knew that the goal, the ambition from the beginning, was we start out with some different characters and playsets and we make sure that we can move forward with new characters later. So, we had to have some unified style so they all felt like they were part of the same set. We have a very talented art director and character design team. There were a number of possibilities and iterations, I remember the concept art for them all and they settled on this very stylised, angular look, that definitely makes them look like toys. All of the figures were designed in-house, by our guys, they were not thrown over the fence to a factory in China. All the design work was done by us and the production was done by the company that did Vinylmation toys.
It must be very cool to have seen the concepts and now look at this little 3D guy on the table?
John Day: Yes. We’re very very proud of what we've kicked out here. These are very cool.
I don’t know what I was expecting from the toys or the quality of the toys but it’s better than what I had imagined.
John Day: We definitely pushed some quality boundaries on these. In fact, we were very adamant about making sure that we got the complexity of the paints and a little bit higher quality plastic because we truly did want to do what Lasseter said which was “I want to have a set of toys I want to collect”. And they have to be collector quality to do that.
Do you think that they can be the king of the lounge room and the king of the schoolyard? Do you anticipate that kids will want to trade Disney Infinity figurines?
John Day: Absolutely! In fact at launch we will have carrying cases and display cases so you’ll be able to take them with you, swap them back and forth. Especially the power discs, these are going to be coming out in blind packs. So, they’ll be in a pack of two, you never know what you’re going to get, inevitably you’re going to get a couple of duplicates and so you can swap those back and forth with your friends so you can get the ones that you need. We see all these things, being traded, being played with just as they are, as toys.
So will some of them will be rarer then others?
John Day: Yeah you’ll have some varying rarities on the power discs for sure.
I’m definitely, already counting the dollar signs in the back of my head.
John Day: (laughs) Well it doesn't come out until August 20th, so you have time to budget and time to save. (laughs)
Coming up with the play sets for each property, that each have their own narrative and world, that seems like essentially making a new game each time in a way. What’s that like? Here’s monsters and we have to make a narrative and their own world and they have different gameplay from cars.
John Day: We do have a lot of things in the game that we can leverage between playsets. The engine that this game is running is called Octane, the same engine that ran Toy Story 3, developed in house by us. We have a lot of technology that’s shared across all of the game. We’re not developing a new game every time, but we do have to develop new mechanics, we do have to build new models and as for narrative we have an extremely talented story team. They’re great writers and great at coming up with these overarching stories. It is a lot of work, but everybody in the office has their Disney favorite. They have their thing that they want to see happen. You get assigned to that one thing that you’re really passionate about and it drives you to do this excellent work. I work on the Monster’s team and the story writer could be working as a writer at Pixar. He’s an absolute fanatic, he’s outstanding and extremely dedicated so we were able to good results.
Are Monster’s your favorite?
John Day: Oh…I don’t know. I'm assigned to Monster’s at work and I really do enjoy working on it. I think it’s a great play set. I like some of the Disney classic stuff too though and moving forward I think we’ll have a chance to revisit some of those. One of my very favorite films is Sleeping Beauty and we have a few winks and nods to Sleeping Beauty now, obviously the castle, but I hope that we get to revisit more and more of those. Choosing the play sets was never easy because everybody has a favorite, so we chose the things that strategically made sense. Monster’s University has a big movie coming out so it makes sense to support that. Moving forward we have some other big upcoming films so you’ll probably see some results there..
Finding Dory?
John Day: (Laughs), maybe…
And then how does that work, cause they’ve got to be underwater?
John Day: Well, we had to figure out how to get racing in the same place as scaring in the same place as sailing a ship on the ocean. We’ll figure something out if we go in that direction.
All the stuff we’ve seen so far is from the more recent Disney properties. The average age of a video gamer is now 28 and we all grew up watching Ducktales and Darkwing duck and those Saturday Disney cartoons. I know if any of that stuff came out with Disney infinity we would all just lose our minds especially with movies like Aladdin and the Lion King.
John Day: (laughs) OK. So, I had a conversation with our story team. Of all the Disney fans in the office, they’re the hardest core. And I went down there after we announced and we had much of our lineup in development and I said “So what do you think the fans are going to want the most?” And they said “Oh, its going to be Aladdin and The Lion King, you watch”. And within minutes of us going live I read through the comments on the YouTube trailer and sure enough The Lion King and Aladdin come up a lot. So its funny you mention those two right out of the shoot.
Those are the two that when we go out for drinks are the ones we end singing the songs from in the pub and the rest of the pub joins in and everyone’s singing A Whole New World and Hakuna Matata at 3am.
John Day: (laughs) Oh I want to go to that pub. There hasn't been anyone who’s come to us and said “No. You can never touch these properties”, that has not happened. Strategically, it makes sense to support a lot of the recent stuff, but we definitely are not oblivious to the fact that we have people that are fans of other things, kind of in the back catalogue, incidentally Darkwing Duck comes up a lot too. We do have some winks and nods to things, we have Scrooge’s money bin in the toy box now but hopefully we can expand on that.
On Ducktales, Capcom announced they’re doing the HD remake and then the internet exploded and people now look to Disney infinity and go “Are you going to give us what we want?”
John Day: (laughs) We see Infinity as an ongoing platform, We’re going to continue to develop for it and support. All of the figures are cross-platform. Not only do they work on the PS3 and the Xbox 360, but should the PS4 come out or the Xbox 720, these will all be forward compatible with the next thing.
Can I plug this base into the next consoles?
John Day: The base is platform specific. When you buy the game, should you buy a 360 edition and you’ll get a 360 base, but the figures and power discs go anywhere.
Will the Wii U base work with the Wii? Or will they be separate?
John Day: I don’t know if they’ll be the same thing. I know we aren’t using the Wii U GamePad, it’s going to have it’s own base, but I don’t know which ones are interchangeable. I know the PS3 and Xbox 360 are separate.
But I can take this figurine and put it on an Xbox and then take it and put it on the Wii U and then put it on the?
John Day: 3DS.
So the 3DS is the same thing?
John Day: The 3DS is a companion product. It’s going to be a little bit of a different game and won’t have a toy box like the console versions but it does support the figures so you can take the figures back and forth.
Would that be a wireless connection?
John Day: I know it has a base but I can’t remember if it’s wired or wireless. I’m not sure. We are going to make sure that these figures never go obsolete. You will always be able to play as Mike once you have him, hopefully five, six years from now if we’re still doing this, which I really hope we are.
You could easily go for five, six years because Disney has an almost bottomless supply of properties and characters and worlds. This has recently become even deeper because now there’s Marvel and Lucasfilm in the mix. Is there are chance we’re going to see Star Wars or Iron Man or the Avengers?
John Day: Well, I'm not prepared to discuss our future product slate, but it sure seems like it would be an awfully lost opportunity not to take advantage of what those properties have to offer.
Even with what these guys look like, they look like the Clone Wars.
John Day: You can see that fitting in right? While I can’t say for sure that we’re going to do Star Wars, you’ll have to wait and see, but they’re definitely on the table. Nobody at Lucas has said “You may never have Star Wars”. That has not happened.
You can get Star Wars anything. So why not Infinity? How will we be able to get the new toys and play sets. Aside from game stores and toy shops, will there be other ways to get the figures and blind packs, like Happy Meals or comics and the like?
John Day: I don’t know what our cross-promotional plans are. In general I think you’re right, the play sets and the figures will be sold at mass market retailers and speciality shops, like video game stores. As for anything else I'm not sure what the plans are. I wouldn't be surprised if we have some, but I don’t know what they are.
What is your favourite character or element in Infinity?
John Day: As we’ve demonstrated, Violet is ridiculously overpowered and as a result she tends to be who I got to if I’m getting beat up in a game. I pick up Violet and fight back, so I like her a lot. As I said I'm a huge Monsters fan, I like Mike a lot, I also like Davey Jones as a character, it’s kind of tough to choose. There’s another character, that may or may not be coming out sometime, around…Halloween…or something, that I'm a big fan of as well. I have a lot of favorites.
Will he bring any friends?
John Day: Not yet. Unfortunately not yet. But we’ll definitely get him.
And what are you most looking forward to?
John Day: Oh shoot dude, are you kidding…Star Wars!
Laughter all round.
John Day: We haven't secured that deal yet, it’s not in the works yet, but I really want it to be. I'm really looking forward to something like that.
Vader, Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie and Boba Fett. The list is endless.
John Day: We could make more characters than we've already made for Infinity just out of Star Wars characters. There are so many great characters in that universe. It would just make too much sense. Stay tuned, I hope that happens soon, but it hasn't happened quite yet.
Have I missed anything that you’d like to tell our readers about or something you’re particularly proud of?
John Day: I think one of the best parts of this, much like playing with toys, it’s often the very best with friends. You can play this game multiplayer, you can play up to 4 players together but we are also going to support you taking what you've built in the toy box and you can save this and submit it to Disney and pending an approval process you can have it published so that anyone else can download it. This includes cross-platform support. I can build something on the Xbox 360 you can download on the PS3. There may be some fine print, you may not be able to edit it and it won’t unlock anything for you but you can still view it and experience it, which is pretty awesome.
That’s very cool, cause it’s not often that you can do that.
John Day: Right? And that’s the plan. Disney’s going to run some contests of who can build the best race track and the best sporting arena and then the winners will have the results published and shared.
In the toy box is an endless amount of gameplay you could create for other players. Races, puzzles, obstacle courses, battle arenas or whatever.
John Day: In this first release of Infinity, if you were to purchase every figure and you got every playset and had every power disc and you got every toy you could get in the toy box, it would be over 1000 toys total. Its a substantial body of work. There’s a lot to the toy box.
That will keep us going for a little while. Until, we get Star Wars, or Ducktales or Darkwing Duck.
John Day: (laughs) Or whatever’s next. We have some Ducktales fanatics in the office and I think they’re trying to sneak content in as we’re just trying to finish up.
Winnie the Pooh…the list just goes on forever.
John Day: Well Disney Channel is all on the table too and the Disney Parks.
Hannah Montana?
Laughs
John Day: Well, Hannah Montana is an option. Then there’s the Tron: Uprising cartoon on the Disney XD channel, I don’t know if you've seen it, but it’s styled much like the 2D Clone Wars cartoon that came out about 10 years ago, it was kind of like a Japanese anime style of cartoon. Tron: Uprising is drawn like that and it’s really cool. All of that stuff is possible, but we only have a team of 220 something people and can only crank out this stuff so fast. We’re going as fast as we can I promise.
So far you've done an awesome job it’s so much fun.
John Day: It’s a fun game, we had a really good time working on it. It’s a lot of work but we love it.
Thanks John.
Thanks to Disney, Avalanche Software, Surprise Attack and most of all John Day for his time.
Credit: Original interview reproduced with full permission of Steve Wright, Editor-in-Chief at Stevivor.com
