Bringing Tatooine and Geonosis to pixelated life for this fall’s game.
It’s official: Disney Infinity 3.0 is headed to a galaxy far, far away this fall, with playsets and characters based on the worlds of Star Wars.
The Hollywood Reporter has exclusive looks at the game’s recreations of Tatooine and Geonosis from the Star Wars: Twilight of the Republic playset. (Geonosis — the planet where the Clone Wars began, as seen in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones — is pictured above, with an image of Tatooine at the bottom of this post.)
Talking to THR, Jeff Bunker, vice president art development for Disney Infinity at developers Avalanche Software, said that as part of the game, “we’ve had the opportunity to work with Pixar, Disney Animation and Marvel, and each one of those has been a huge opportunity — and when we’re in the middle of it, each felt like the most important properties we could work with — but I have to admit, there’s something unique about Star Wars.”
“There’s a lot of hardcore Star Wars fans inside the studio,” lead artist Sebastian Gallego added. “For many, it was a once in a lifetime opportunity.”
Working on the game meant working closely with Lucasfilm, Bunker and Gallego explained — not only the art department (“We had the chance to look at the most amazing set pictures, designs and models inside the Lucas archive that no-one else outside of Lucasfilm had seen,” Gallego said), but the story team as well. That, as it turned out, proved to be a useful partnership.
“Working on [Tatooine spaceport] Mos Espa, we needed to build gates,” Gallego said. “We started to build wood-looking gates, and Lucasfilm took one look at it and said, ‘It’s a desert planet. There’s not even one tree on Tatooine. There’s no wood on the planet at all.’ We hadn’t even thought of that. You don’t think of these things until you’re talking to the people who really know about the worlds.”
The Infinity design team shared everything with Lucasfilm, according to Bunker. “There’s definitely a lot of back and forth with the team at Lucasfilm to ensure that they’re happy, because if we’re keeping the filmmakers happy, we’ll probably keep the fans happy,” he said. “There was something a little bit terrifying about taking something as well known as Star Wars and not being exactly true to it, but trying to find the essence and the simplification of that thing. What’s not important to you might be important to another person.”
“We put a lot of heart and soul into this, you can tell,” Gallego said. “If the artists didn’t have some connection with the material, you’d see it. It’s pretty obvious that this is a lot of our team’s childhood dreams come true.”
