Epic Mickey By Disney Flops

Written by Seth Schiesel Saturday, 04 February 2012 23:11

New York – Disney decided to explore the possibilities of entering the video games and the results have been catastrophic. I have a serious question for Robert A. Iger, the president and chief executive of the Walt Disney Company: Did you get both hands on a Nintendo Wii controller and personally play through several hours of Disney Epic Mickey? If so, perhaps you think that everyday game players have a lot more patience and a much higher tolerance for frustration than they do. And that is because Disney Epic Mickey is one of those enticing yet deeply flawed games that is a lot more fun to watch than to play.  Epic Mickey is an ambitious and often impressive re-imagination of the world’s first true animated star, Mickey Mouse. But as an entertainment experience for the person who has to control all of the jumping and running and spinning involved, it breaks down and fails in bafflingly basic ways. I suspect that many families are going to buy this game, get through a fraction of what ought to be a roughly 15-hour story and put it down forever in frustration at their inability to make Mickey survive. , Disney Epic Mickey is a brilliant and sophisticated concept that isn’t very fun to play. Disney Epic Mickey is a platforming game: if you miss the jumps to the platforms, bad things happen, like having to start over.

This may sound mundane, but it seems obvious that if you can’t see where you’re going in a game like this, nothing else matters. Not the clever characters. Not the endearing soundtrack. Not even the intriguing plot lines. Nope. If you fall into pits and die dozens and dozens of times simply because the game won’t properly maneuver the player’s eye-in-the-sky perspective, the fun disappears. This is basic technical and mechanical stuff that most of the game industry seemed to figure out a decade ago, but Disney hasn’t with Epic Mickey.

How this could happen reveals a lot about why big international media companies like Disney generally continue to struggle to make great games. I believe it comes down to the fact that senior executive leadership at these companies generally has not had the inclination or the ability to engage with the creative reality of the product — actually to play the games. And that means they can’t make the final call on big-budget games with the same confidence they show in traditional media.

So if this game were a major Disney film or a big new series on the company’s ABC network, can you imagine how personally involved Mr. Iger and the rest of the Disney brass would be? How many screeners and rough cuts they would have watched? How much guidance would they have felt not only justified but also obligated to deliver? Perhaps Mr. Iger would even have solicited the personal reactions of the members of the company’s board of directors.

To make Epic Mickey, Disney acquired the services — and the entire development studio — of one of gaming’s most respected designers, Warren Spector. Personally, I’m a huge fan. Mr. Spector’s System Shock and Thief games essentially defined the early generation of first-person stealth shooters. (System Shock and its sequel are science-fiction horror classics that are among the scariest games ever made.)

Deus Ex, another Spector game, is one of the best cyberpunk games yet. What do these games have in common? They are all set in the first person. (You’re looking out from your character’s perspective.) In tone, they are all distinctly aimed at adults. And they were all originally made for PCs and mouse-and-keyboard controls.

Disney Epic Mickey gets all of the high-concept stuff right. The story involves Mickey’s journey to a phantasy version of the Magic Kingdom, where forgotten Disney creations of the past, led by Walt Disney’s original Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, languish in obscurity. Oswald is jealous of Mickey’s rise to fame, but the two eventually make common cause against the evil Shadow Blot. Mr. Spector’s storytelling influence is seen clearly in the fact that seemingly minor choices made early in the game can have vast, unexpected consequences later.

If Mr. Iger actually played Disney Epic Mickey, he obviously didn’t make Mr. Spector’s team fix its glaring interface problems. If he didn’t actually play, that should tell you something about why Disney doesn’t make great games, and why Epic Mickey isn’t more, well, epic.

By Seth Schiesel / NY Times