Warren Spector on Making Mickey Epic

Epic Mickey was recently confirmed to be in development, but it still left many questions unanswered about the enigmatic title. Unabashed Disney fan Warren Spector went into detail with Game Informer about the history of Mickey Mouse and gave some detail about the game's setting and gameplay.

"The central game play mechanic of Disney Epic Mickey is paint and thinner. It’s basically drawing and erasing; it’s making the world whole, or making it go away. And that’s part of a – over the last five or ten years I’ve been feeling really constrained by the fact that game designers – we build sets. We build things where if you scratch an inch below the surface, there’s nothing there; if you peek behind the walls you see that they’re flats held up with 2x4s," said Spector. "And so this whole paint and thinner mechanic really plays into that because you can dynamically change the world to suit your needs. So dynamically changing the environment to solve problems is kind of what it’s about."

"The Mickey game is set in the world called the Wasteland, which is a land of forgotten and rejected Disney creativity," he continued. "The backstory fiction is Walt Disney couldn’t throw anything away – the archives are evidence of that – and if he couldn’t throw like a piece of paper away, how could he bear for the fruits of his imagination and his animators’ imaginations, and the Imagineers’ imaginations – how could he bear to see that just lost forever?"

When asked why Epic Mickey is being designed exclusively for the Wii, Spector responded: "Well, think about it. Would you really want to tackle convincing Halo or Grand Theft Auto players that they want to be Mickey Mouse? Would you really want to do that? In terms of finding a congenial audience, let’s go for a platform that’s known for Mario and Link and now Sonic. Come on. Honestly, with the unit sales on the hardware, it was kind of a lucky happenstance. We made the call to go to the Wii long before it was clear that the Wii was going to be, at least for now, the best-selling platform."

If you knew the character on the right before today, then you'd get along fine with Warren Spector.

While we agree with Spector's reasoning for bringing the game to the Wii, we think he's also selling PS3 and Xbox 360 audiences short. The Kingdom Hearts games were very Disney intensive and sold millions of copies on the PS2 and we're certain there are plenty of gamers on forums right now clamoring for this game on PS3 and Xbox 360. Now that the PS3 is getting a motion controller that lends itself to Wii ports, maybe Epic Mickey will only be exclusive to the Wii for a short period.