Now that Epic Mickey is nearly upon us, Junction Point Studios boss Warren Spector is taking this time to discuss the development of the Wii platformer, and among other things, even touch on those leaked concept art pieces from many moons ago. When we all thought the then-unannounced game was going to be a dark and gritty, steampunk-esque affair. Spector tells Develop that Disney pitched him the game concept, about “a world of old rejected Disney stuff”, and that even at the time of its announcement when we got the first glimpse, things were not set in stone. Like the design of Mickey himself.

“When we did the announcement of the game in October [2009], I was still changing the way he looks, and at one point I thought, you know what – this is wrong. This is wrong. I shouldn’t do this.  And I felt so stupid because we already published screenshots, and I made the very tough call of… oh my god, it was crazy – I said we’re not doing this. We’re changing it.“

Spector continues on, turning attention to the leaked pieces of art (below), which depicted a vision of the Disney world unlike anything previously seen before. While they impressed fans, these unfortunately were merely “part of the iterative process,” and were not indicative of the project’s outcome, as we came to realize.

“In game design, the kind of creative play that goes into getting an end result should never be seen in public. Those images that were leaked; they were all part of this iterative process.” He teases “but what if one of our crazier Mickey concepts leaked? What if one of the thousand images that got leaked was of a Mickey that we’d never use? You should have seen the one of the classy Mickey in the white suit!”

In the end, Epic Mickey definitely looks all kinds of amazing, so no disappointments. We may even get to see what it looks like in HD someday, too. The game’s not coming out until November, but Disney did unleash a slew of brand new screenshots out of PAX last weekend, which you can check out below.


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