Graham Hopper, executive VP and general manager at Disney Interactive Studios, has an interview at GameSpot. The company recently changed it’s name from Buena Vista Games and has been responsible for many of your favorite Disney video games and some more recent ones like ‘Spectrobes’ and the new Pirates Of The Caribbean games
the reason why we’ve put so much effort into making Pirates of the Caribbean a great game is that we see this as not just any other game or any other movie. This is one of the biggest movie franchises out there and it’s our ambition to build it into a game franchise of equivalent stature.
In many ways the model there might be something like Star Wars has done. That sounds very ambitious to say that but if you use that as a target, it gives you a sense of how we are looking at it. So we have active plans for additional Pirates of the Caribbean games that will release in future years when there is no movie. And the nice thing about that, is that there is no time constraint on us and we’ll have the ability to really produce some really, really great games in the Pirates universe and really immerse people in it.
As a Disney fan I’d love to see Pirates become a Star Wars like franchise. Just make sure there is Story Czar to make sure everything fits neatly in the universe. Don’t want to end up with an JarJar Binks like mistakes.
Disney Interactive Studios covers every Disney brand, although some properties remain with other companies due to pre-existing contracts (mostly Pixar and ESPN branded games). (Read more)