Disney Talks About Pirates Of The Caribbean for Wii and DS

This is An excerpt from an Aussie-Nintendo interview with Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End Wii / DS game producer Jeff Blattner:

AN: Late last year, Disney established a new studio to focus solely on creating products for Nintendo platforms. Clearly your company agrees with Nintendo’s newfound philosophy of making games that everyone can play, and choosing to focus on gameplay over graphics?

JB: Well, you know, Nintendo is a company with obviously a rich history in videogames. And some amazing intellectual property that are recognisable around the world – everybody knows Mario, even if they haven’t played videogames. And strangely enough, the Walt Disney Company is also a company with amazing and broad intellectual property – there’s almost essentially nobody on the planet who doesn’t know who Mickey Mouse is. So, we both have a vested interest in reaching people with great, rich experiences, and the Nintendo platforms – both past and present – have afforded us an opportunity to reach Disney fans everywhere, with our properties and deliver a gaming experience that’s rich and rewarding for them. And Pirates of the Caribbean is one of Disney’s greatest properties, and, really delivers to a Nintendo player.

AN: Do you think that - given the unique capabilities of the Nintendo DS and Wii - we’ll see a lot more brand new IPs coming to these platforms over the others?

JB: I was at a talk last year given by Bob Iger, and it wasn’t about videogames specifically, but we all enjoy a large variety of entertainment choices, more available to us now than at any time in human history. And the Walt Disney Company is committed to delivering the right type of content to consumers however they want to receive it, and certainly, consumers have demonstrated their commitment to DS and Wii, but we are also interested in continuing to develop for those platforms but we want to make sure that we reach our consumers no matter what platform choices they’ve made.

AN: The average Australian game-player is 28-years-old, and I’ve personally seen people much older than myself buying into the Wii and DS. Yet, it seems you’re only bringing games suited to younger players to Nintendo platforms. Will this change in the future?

JB: I think that the Disney brand, frankly, stands for family values and core values. Pirates obviously has a particular appeal and a particular sort of age slot, so, while we are trying to make sure we appeal to people who are young at heart, we are also trying to appeal to people of all ages. We would never consciously ignore any of our audiences on a platform, so I think that with any title that we create now, we’ll definitely take into consideration gamers and gamers, like you said, the average gamer in Australia – and I’m not going to doubt your statistics of 28. And certainly, I think there are a lot of gamers around that age, and we’d never want to exclude them from anything, but there are sometimes factors that determine what platforms you’re supporting based on just the platform’s image. There are technological reasons, or a developer may not have experience with a platform and things like that. I think that what you’re seeing on Nintendo Wii is there obviously are new properties coming out that will appeal to the mature gamer, but we’re going to decide on a property first and, you know, Disney Interactive Studios is going to choose properties that are appropriate to it.

Full Interview 

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