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Interview: Epic Mickey's Allen Varney

Bob talks with Allen Varney about the genesis of Epic Mickey

- by Bob McLain, January 24, 2011

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I first met Allen Varney, co-author with Epic Mickey creator Warren Spector of the game's original design document, back in the early 1980s. At the time, Allen was editing one of Steve Jackson's roleplaying magazines, The Space Gamer, and I was publishing my own magazine, Gaming Universal.

(Warren Spector also had a turn editing The Space Gamer, and I was briefly a Contributing Editor.)

Allen moved on to bigger and better things, including his receent work on Epic Mickey for Junction Point, the company co-founded by Spector and then acquired in 2007 by Disney Interactive.

Besides his work on Epic Mickey, Allen has also written many, many articles and books about game design, developed three boardgames, authored two dozen role-playing supplements, and provides guidance to those interested in becoming game designers themselves.

Allen chatted with me about his contributions to Epic Mickey. Here's our conversation...

Describe your career trajectory from editing a Steve Jackson role-playing magazine to co-writing the design document for Epic Mickey with Warren Spector, the game's creator.

Allen: Steve Jackson Games was an active training ground for gaming professionals in the 1980s. Steve would recruit talent from across the country to work for him, then inevitably drive them away. While I worked there (1984-86) under Editor-in-Chief Warren Spector, I built connections with several tabletop roleplaying game companies. In 1986 I left SJG and went freelance. Over the next decade I wrote books and RPG supplements for TSR, West End, FASA, Hero Games, and others.
Meanwhile, Warren moved first to TSR, then to another productive training ground, Origin Systems, where he became a 20th-Level Enlightened Black-Belt Jedi Master Computer Game Producer. At SJG Warren and I had always worked like two halves of the same brain. For an unproduced project at Looking Glass Studios he brought me in on contract to develop concepts and storylines - and then, when Disney gave the Mickey project to Junction Point Studios, I was (along with programmer Alex Duran) the first guy Warren enlisted for pre-production.

What, exactly, is a design document for a video game? Does it trace game-play from start to finish or is it more conceptual? Is writing a video game design document - for you, anyway - similar to writing a novel or is it more like drafting technical specs?

Allen: Design documents vary not only by game type, but also by the stage of the project. An ideal production doc is, if not a defined spec, at least a strong set of pointers for the team. Later in a game's production cycle, as the creators develop a clear sense of where they're heading, they typically let the design doc fall by the wayside.
An early-stage concept doc - the kind I wrote for Epic Mickey - is a wish list, often a sheer flight of fancy. In pre-production Warren likes an all-of-the-above spec, a huge doc filled with ideas. This kind of design doc resembles a roleplaying campaign setting book that describes a whole world and the things players can do there. Such a document describes a complete game in varying levels of detail - arguably, it describes two or three complete games, and then the challenge becomes sorting out the best elements for the final game.

How long did it take you to write the design document? Is Epic Mickey's final storyline pretty close to what you had envisioned while working on the design document?

Allen: My original Junction Point Studios contract ran from late 2005 until Spring 2006. For that contract, Alex Duran and I produced a 300-page Epic Mickey design document. That document promised a lot of great stuff, and maybe some boneheaded stuff, but ultimately it proved mostly inspirational, or aspirational. In retrospect the doc at least shows the way toward the finished game, the way a signpost in Georgia helps through-hikers start on the Appalachian Trail. They know their destination is somewhere 2,200 miles north in Maine and New Brunswick, and they'll figure it out as they go.
In that early stage, Warren and I didn't get the story working to our total satisfaction, so Warren brought me back on a second contract for five months in early 2008. With intense brainstorming sessions almost every day, and help from Junction Point Studios manager Paul Weaver, Warren and I lurched and crawled forward by inches. By the end of that contract, we had rebuilt the storyline into most of Epic Mickey's final plot. The framing sequence, with the wizard Yen Sid, was added after I left; otherwise, absent a few cuts for relativistic reasons (you know, space and time), the published game's storyline closely resembles that 2008 redraft.

You also wrote the cutscenes. How many cutscenes are in the game? Would you compare writing a cutscene for Epic Mickey to storyboarding (part of) a comic book or was it strictly dialog and then someone else came in to do the rest?

Allen: On yet a third contract in 2010 I wrote 60-65 cutscenes with a combined running time of over half an hour. I wrote the cutscenes as filmscripts, with full dialog plus suggestions for staging and camera angles. Warren gave me great feedback, as did Junction Point animation director Jorma Auburn and animator Lahela Ino.
After a round or two of revisions, Jorma passed the approved scripts to Powerhouse Animation, a freelance studio in Austin, Texas. The Powerhouse team carried the scripts forward through storyboards, animatics, roughs, and finished renders. I really like the final cutscenes for their color, wit, and expressive feeling.
Warren and I had practically liquefied our brains while developing the overall storyline, as we headed down many dead ends and false byways. In contrast, I found writing the cutscene scripts a joy. They flowed easily, and the final scenes are mostly just as I'd pictured them in my post-liquefied brain.

Would you say the game flows just the way you hoped it would based on your initial design?

Allen: The Epic Mickey gameplay inevitably evolved a long way from my original starry-eyed descriptions. Just as no battle plan survives contact with the enemy, not many design ideas for innovative games survive prototyping and then serious playtesting. That didn't start until long after my original design contract ended and I was long gone. Also, my original design doc assumed a PlayStation 3 or cross-platform release. A year after I left, Epic Mickey became a Nintendo Wii exclusive. The change in platform dictated a major design overhaul.
But in the published Epic Mickey game I still see a strong flavor of our earliest brainstorming. From the first, Warren wanted a cartoony world, a presentation of Mickey Mouse that recalled his early adventures, and playstyle choices that mattered. The elements from my design document that survived to the finished game owe their longevity to Warren's clear vision, at every stage, of the game he wanted to make.

What up there on the horizon? More work for Junction Point? Other projects?

Allen: I'm writing a couple of novels and working on a small special-purpose gaming website I hope to launch in mid-2011. And I'm always happy to entertain requests, offers, imploring pleas, and happy accidents.

Apart from Epic Mickey, are you a huge Disney fan?

Allen: First and foremost, I adore and revere the Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comics by the great Carl Barks, as well as those of his spiritual successor, Don Rosa. And I admire Walt Disney the man. He had a genuinely world-changing imagination and became, on a scale never before seen, a peerless impresario. We fans are still living in his world, and on Epic Mickey I was privileged to work in it.

Thanks very much, Allen!

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