Unleash your inner Buzz

ONCE UPON a time, a videogame based on a film was a big deal – a major event in the gaming calendar and a virtually guaranteed big seller.

Then, after a decade or so of disappointing adaptations, they lost their lustre. The reasons were many: the games were rushed out to meet with film-release dates; the budgets weren’t large enough; or it appeared that the film studio just didn’t care enough.

Game developer Asobo has attempted to avoid that trap. Its adaptation of the beloved Pixar film Wall-Ewon multiple accolades, thanks no doubt to Pixar's hands-on approach.

Asobo’s office is distinctive for two reasons: firstly, it sits on the sixth floor of a Bordeaux building, giving employees a breathtaking view of the elegant French town. Secondly, there are kids present – slumped on a waiting-room couch and politely waving at the guest journalists. Asobo do market-research with young schoolchildren every Wednesday. “Because the average [employee’s] age is between 25 and 30, it’s very important that we test our game as much as possible with the target audience,” says Sebastian Wloch, the company’s co-founder and co-executive officer, “and to make sure kids think it’s fun, and that it’s not just fun for us. Most of us play a lot of games, but we’re not kids any more.”

The latest Pixar/Asobo collaboration is Kinect Rush: A Disney Pixar Adventure. Utilising Kinect, the Xbox's hands-free gaming technology, the game puts the player into new scenarios with familiar characters from five Pixar films; Up, Toy Story, Ratatouille, The Incrediblesand Cars.The game is aimed at young kids, and a new innovation is the creation of Pixar-themed avatars based on the players, so your face and body are scanned by the Kinect camera and then a Pixar avatar based on your features appears in the game.

“We had a lot of communication and collaboration with Pixar,” says David Dedeine, creative director for Asobo. “So on some aspects we didn’t have any control, such as the art style, because it was not apropos to try to reinvent something. We tried to match as much as possible the Pixar world, look and feel.

“Our creative aspect of the game is more based on game-play and the creation of the [central] character. For example, having the [game’s] user scan ported into the Pixar world as himself and not as a Pixar character; we needed to create characteristics for that. So we’ve met the Pixar guys a lot in order to define which features it would have, how we create this character in order to make them match with the way players dress and wear their hair.

"We have worked on the Toy Storysection with Bob Paulie, the creator of Buzz Lightyear, and we did a lot of back and forth in order to create a toy that matched with the Toy Storyuniverse.

"We've taken advantage of things that have been made for the movie but not used. In the Tokyo level in Cars, that's the case, and in a base from The Incredibles. We also do that with the characters in Ratatouille. We have two characters – Celine and Twitch – who are not in that movie, but we know that Pixar were happy to see them come to life through the game because they didn't have a chance to use them in the movie."

The level of detail is impressive. Most of the films' voice actors are returning for the game. One animator told me that the plants on the island in The Incrediblesare placed in their natural environment – with one tree being moved away from a riverbank, for example, because it wouldn't grow there in real life.

Shepherding five separate films into one game was tricky, so Asobo devised the concept of having the missions based on playground games where children describe their own take on a Pixar adventure. As the children describe the scenario, it brings gameplayers into contact with the characters familiar from the Pixar films.

“Characters don’t go from one movie to another,” says Wloch. “We can’t have separate properties relating to each other in the one level. So we built this [playground] hub around the game, so you’re a lot more immersed.”

Kinect Rush: A Pixar Adventureis out