Via Starwars.com:
ONCE CONNECTED THROUGH THE FORCE, A BAND OF ARTISTS COME TOGETHER AT DISNEY’S TOY BOX SUMMIT.
Disney Interactive knows how to throw a party for their fans. In the second annual Toy Box Summit, this time held at Disneyland’s California Adventure, the company brought fans from all around the world to play with the new Star Wars characters and creations two weeks before the newest iteration of their hit toys-to-life game, Disney Infinity 3.0 Edition, hits store shelves. The fans, coined “master artists,” won the chance to take the trip to Anaheim for the Summit and D23 Expo simply by creating the best Toy Boxes possible, as voted on by fans and those in the company alike.
Things were a little different for the second year, as this time instead of individual Toy Boxes, the master artists were placed onto teams collaborating on a single assigned planetary body from the Star Wars universe.
“In Disney Infinity 2.0, collaboration became such an important part of the community,” explained Patrick Efird (aka Papa Echo), one of the Toy Box artists hired by Disney Interactive as a full-time employee after the first version of the game debuted. “People who never met in person until this Summit had met up online and built Toy Boxes together. So we felt like we had to make it collaborative. Last year was more every man for himself, but the passion for collaboration and having Star Wars meant we had to do something special for it.”
The focus, Efird told StarWars.com, shifted a bit with this version of the game as well. Continuing to build on the idea of using Disney Infinity to make your own stories with your favorite characters from across the Disney family, he found the competitors this year immediately took to the new “creativitoys” that allow for more in-depth stories.
“It’s all about storytelling. We had people trying to let players relive the epic moments from the movies right away: the trench run, speeder chase through the forest,” Efird said of the Toy Boxes fans created in one marathon 17-hour overnight session. “Then we had people making their own twists on things, like the Battle of Hoth from the Empire’s perspective, which was a lot of fun to see. Then we had some that did sort of a ‘choose your own path’ with moral choices; do you go to the dark side or maintain the ways of the Jedi? It’s all really fun.”
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