The Disney archives, it's 84 years of history. The one way in which I feel I'm a kindred spirit with Walt Disney is that neither one of us ever throws anything away. He never threw anything away.
Once we can do Pixar-quality graphics rendered in real time with interactivity, I could see games costing $200 million to make, and all of a sudden you have to sell a lot of games just to break even, so I'm a little worried someone's going to do that.
My first encounter with video games was pretty conventional. I was travelling with my parents - we used to take long cross country trips in the United States every summer - and we went into a restaurant where there happened to be a Pong machine, and I was... a lot of quarters went into that Pong machine, let's just say.
Seriously, I don't know if people would really tell you this. But in my dream world, the people who work for you would say, 'Wow, I didn't know I could do that until I started working with that guy.'
I started playing video games, and in 1978 I discovered Dungeons & Dragons and started game-mastering and writing my own adventures and creating my own worlds.
I said to myself as Junction Point embarked on the Epic Mickey journey that, worst case, we'd be 'a footnote in Disney history.' Looking back on it, I think we did far better than that.
On the small scale, 'Ico,' I think, actually delivered a small new thing: holding a character's hand and really feeling like your job is to rescue this person, and establishing a personal connection.
Oswald is an interesting character. Disney lost the rights to him in 1928 to Universal, who was distributing the cartoons and basically handed him over to Walter Lantz.
I was an independent developer and started Junction Point in January of 2005.
Everyone at Junction Point has been inspired by the creative folks at Pixar and Disney Feature Animation to make 'entertainment for everyone.'
The Junction Point journey is over. To all those who've asked, or want to ask, I'm sad but excited for the future.
Used games allow more people, specifically younger people, to become game fans because of the lower price point.
As far as the timing, well, I'd write that off to luck as much as anything - I happened to be out looking for a development deal, and Disney happened to think my team and I might be the right people to make a Mickey Mouse game.
The fact is most computer roleplaying games that offer a zillion highly specialized skills end up with nine-tenths of a zillion skills that every player quickly realizes aren't worth the experience points to buy.
We're not going to do a Facebook game aimed at 35-year old women about farming.
I've loved cartoons all along. Most people outgrow that when they hit 10 or 12, I guess, but I never did. I'm not sure why.
Whatever adults don't understand, because they didn't grow up with it, is the thing they're going to be afraid of and try to legislate out of existence. It happened with videogames, it happened with television, it happened with pinball parlours and rock and roll.
I've got a PowerPoint deck that I use for internal presentations, and there's a slide on it that asks, 'What percentage of your game is combat versus exploration versus puzzle solving versus platforming,' and I refuse to answer that question.
My wife, Caroline Spector, and I pitched some comic ideas to various publishers back in the '80s, but nothing ever came of it.
I have no interest in guys who wear armor and swing big swords.
