Toy Story 3 The Videogame Preview Part 1

Say what you like about the corporate machine that is Disney: they have a lovely HQ. And lovely staff too. One such lovely member of staff is the gregarious and affable Jon Warner, producer at Avalanche Studios, the folks behind the new Toy Story video game to coincide with the cinematic release of the eagerly awaited third installation in the popular series.

Upon gratefully receiving an invitation to meet Jon and have a gander at his new game, I was escorted through the HQ, passing a life-size statue of Tony Stark’s first Iron Man suit, an office adorned with a six foot Lego model of Woody the toy cowboy and a High School Musical themed meeting room, complete with lockers. Eventually, we are led to a small office, where Jon awaits our arrival, Xbox at the ready. He grins and shakes us each by the hand cordially. Once he’s satisfied we’re comfortable, he begins to describe Toy Story 3: The Video Game, his pride and delight practically tangible.

‘Let’s start from the start then,’ Jon says. ‘We came up with the idea for the game in November 2007. Pixar had invited us down to have a look at a real early, preliminary screening – it was storyboards that they’d put together in kind of an animated reel. There was no dialogue in it or anything; it was just narrated by the director, Lee Unkrich. It was great, it was brilliant. We were there with a bunch of other licensers, like Mattel, in the theatre watching this presentation and man, it was good. By the end of the screening there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. The lights went up, you feel tears in your eyes, you’re like, “oh no, this is going to be embarrassing!” But the lights come up and everyone is choked up: it was that good, it was that powerful.

‘So when we left Pixar, we thought, “We can’t do an average game treatment for this one”, you know, “see the movie, play the game”, it just didn’t feel right. First of all, Pixar had done a great job on telling that story and I don’t think it was right for us to rehash it; we didn’t want to do that. We thought what would be really cool is if we could give Andy’s toys to everybody, the players: if you could take Andy’s toys and play with them any way you wanted to. So we hung onto that idea, it sounded right. We developed the idea and called it The Toy Box, where it’s a big sandbox environment and you get to play as Buzz, Woody or Jessie and it’s a big, open, free environment, where you get to play with Andy’s toys the way you want to, not the way we want you to.

‘We took that idea back to Pixar and said, “Hey, we want to make this Toy Story 3 game that has nothing to do with Toy Story 3, how do you like it?” That was a little intimidating, so we also pitched a kind of a more traditional approach and asked them which one they wanted us to do. They kind of looked at each other and said, “We like both ideas – could you do both?” So we did – if Pixar ask you to do both, you do both!’

‘That was a pretty big challenge. The we approached it was to have The Toy Box be the core experience, the bulk of it and have Story Mode be a briefer, almost a bonus experience, for players who want to relive and replay the moments of the film that they really loved, they’ll be there, but we don’t have to try to make that into eight hours of gameplay, which, I don’t know about you but often in film tie-in games, sometime feels kind of forced. We didn’t want to do that.’

http://www.blogomatic3000.com/2010/06/24/exclusive-toy-story-3-the-videogame-hands-on-report-pt-1/