LOS ANGELES — Imagine monster truck tires on Cinderella’s carriage. Or Capt. Jack Sparrow being smacked around by Sulley from “Monsters Inc.” Maybe Mr. Incredible, armed with a toilet-paper-roll launcher, riding in Peter Pan’s flying pirate ship.
It’s all possible, and it’s all sanctioned by the Walt Disney Company — a company known, at least until now, for maintaining rigid walls between its character and movie franchises.
On Tuesday, Disney Interactive Studios unveiled Infinity, an ambitious video game and action figure initiative. Infinity, three years in the making under the code name Toy Box, will allow players to mix and match characters and props from Disney and Pixar movies, including the “Pirates of the Caribbean” series and “The Incredibles.” Never before has Disney allowed this type of mash-up.
“If you want Mr. Incredible riding in Cinderella’s coach, go for it,” said John Blackburn, general manager of Avalanche, a game development studio owned by Disney that made Infinity, at a demonstration this month.
Infinity is similar to Skylanders, a popular toy and video game franchise from Activision Blizzard. Skylanders has generated more than $500 million in sales since its arrival in 2011; about 30 million related toys have been sold under the brand. Skylanders players collect action figures, then transfer them into the game’s action by plugging them into a sensor base.
That kind of digital hit is urgently needed at Disney Interactive, which has lost money for the last 16 quarters — more than $1 billion.
Lately, though, it has been introducing new products, including a revamped Disney.com, in an effort to turn a profit by the end of the year.
Infinity is scheduled to arrive in stores in June, pegged to the release in theaters of Pixar’s “Monsters University.” It will be available on gaming consoles (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii) and on the Internet. A full mobile version is scheduled to arrive shortly after.
To play Infinity, users will buy a $75 game. It will come with a base where figurines of various Disney and Pixar characters can be plugged in.
Three figures come with the starter kit: Sulley, Jack Sparrow and Mr. Incredible. Other figures and add-ons will be sold separately, priced at $5 to $35. Disney’s goal is to create a collecting frenzy — certain figures will be intentionally hard to find — while rolling out new characters from its archives. Expect “Star Wars” and Marvel figures down the road, for instance.
“We want to focus on products that are superhigh-quality and that can be sustained and built on over time,” said John Pleasants, co-president of Disney Interactive. “I really want this to move the bar for the Walt Disney Company.”
Disney declined to comment on Infinity’s development costs, but analysts estimate that Activision spent at least $100 million to introduce Skylanders.
For all its promise, Infinity comes with major challenges. It will immediately be compared to Skylanders, for starters. Also, Disney has struggled in the video game business in part because its main characters are more popular with girls than with boys (who make up the bigger gaming audience). And parents may balk at adding yet another collectible toy line to their carts. Infinity is also a complex game, posing a challenge for Disney marketers.
To understand what a major departure it is for Disney to allow characters to be combined in one world — even a virtual one — consider what happened at the entertainment giant a decade ago when its consumer products division wanted to repackage Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White as Disney Princesses. Traditionalists revolted, including Roy E. Disney, the nephew of the company’s founder and then a board member.
Allowing Pixar and Disney characters to exist and interact in a single video game world was not quite as controversial, but there was still significant resistance, according to Mr. Blackburn of Avalanche. He described the reaction by some senior Disney executives to Infinity not with words but by making a gruesome facial expression. (Picture someone taking a strong whiff of sour milk.)
But John Lasseter, Pixar’s chief creative officer, became an early supporter and threw the animation studio’s full weight behind the game. He had a trusting relationship with Mr. Blackburn’s studio, which made Toy Story 3: The Video Game, a product that allows users to edit the playing world as they see fit. Ultimately, Disney’s reluctant “brand stewards” were asked to take an early version of Infinity home and watch how their children played with it.
The realization began to sink in: if Disney wanted to do something big in the game arena, it would need to let people play in a less restrictive way. Mr. Blackburn said the thinking in the corporate ranks became, “O.K., maybe we are holding too close to some of these characters.”
One of the resulting Infinity marketing slogans reads: “Their worlds. Your imagination. No rules.”
Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/15/new-video-game-features-disney-and-pixar-mash-ups/?partner=rss&emc=rss
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