Up and Away

Pixar has recently released a second trailer for next year's new film, Up. As most may already know, THQ has the exclusive rights to publish games based on the Pixar license. A couple of summers ago saw the release of Cars and we had the second best selling game of the year only falling behind Madden. We had over a billion dollars in sales that year (with the help of a couple of quality PC releases and the WWE license) and things looked good. Fast forward a couple of years and things are not looking as rosy for my company.

One of the things that has taken the blame for our shortcomings have been the performance of this license. First, Ratatouille underperformed last summer and then Wall-E suffered the same fate this summer. Ratatouille's failure was justified because it was about a rat and people might find that "icky." But when Wall-E did the same, people said, "WTF? He's a robot, how did he not sell?"

I don't think it was a over saturated kids and casual market that did these games in (it didn't help), but rather that Pixar is creating movies that are way over our designers' heads.

I'm not saying that the designers didn't understand the movies; I'm saying that the themes did not translate into an interactive form very well. In fact, it's debatable if anyone could have done it at all. Games as art is a current hot button topic in our industry and the themes that Pixar put forth would trouble the best minds our industry has to offer.

Cars was a no-brainer: it's a movie about a car, who races. The design document must have written itself (I'm kidding). On the other hand, can Ratatouille or Wall-E be boiled down to a simple platformer? Remy teaches us in Ratatouille that anyone can become anything the want, regardless if he's a rat or a woman or French (sorry, I kid again). And Wall-E teaches us the importance of conservation and loneliness and the need to be loved even if you are just a robot with a single directive. Up looks like it depicts the feeling that life has passed one by and you're running out of time to seize the moment. These aren't simple concepts and they most certainly aren't conveyed by collecting 100 trinkets while hopping your way through a linear level.

I think our biggest weakness when it comes to the Pixar license is that we attack them from a literal angle and just allow the player to replay through the story. What I'd like to see us do is allow the player to step into the shoes so to speak of these dynamic characters and explore some of these deeper themes. I don't want to play the movie, I have the DVD for that. I want our license to create an experience that can be fun for all gamers but evokes the weight of the emotions that each film brings to the screen. It won't be easy, but I think it's possible.