Spector - currently at work on Epic Mickey - has told Variety that prior to picking up work the Disney gig, he and his wife had been kicking some ideas around for new projects, one a massive piece of original IP, the other a "spiritual successor" to Deus Ex.

He says that at one time he tried to get the rights to his game back from publishers Eidos, but they weren't willing to part with it, so Spector was forced to come up with a Go-Bots to Deus Ex's Transformers.

"There were and still are ‘Deus Ex' stories I would like to tell. That story is not done for me," he told Variety. "[For the sci-fi game] I sort of filed the serial numbers off. ‘Deus Ex' was very much a game of the millennium."

Behind the scenes at "Epic Mickey" – Part One [Variety]

"There haven't been a lot of games like this on the Wii," he said. "There hasn't been a game that offers the kind of interactions and choices that this offers."

While he told us that the game won't be coming to any other platforms, that wasn't always the case.

In an interview with Official Nintendo Magazine, Spector said that the game started out as a PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 title. At some point the head of Disney Interactive pulled Spector into his office to ask the designer how the game was coming along and what it would take to make it sing. Spector replied that he would like to focus on a single platform.

"At that time we were talking about a Wii port and I was begging people - no, we can't just port to the Wii, it's not going to work. It needs to be its own game. A lot of the design ideas just won't work on the Wii, we need to give the Wii its dues. Graham looked at me and said 'What do you think about a Wii exclusive?' And I went 'Holy cow - yeah!'"

While Spector is deep in the development cycle of what sounds to be an ambitious game, one that could spawn a franchise and extend into other mediums, I was able to goad him into talking a little bit about future plans.

With Disney's recent acquisition of Marvel and Spector's love of comics, in particular Marvel, I couldn't help but wonder if he hopes to work on a Marvel game in the future.

Spector reminded me that he worked on the Marvel Super Heroes role-playing game back in the 80s for TSR.

"I wrote a Marvel game book called One Thing After Another," he said. "And I was able to write the words 'It's clobbering time' and know that Stan Lee would read them.

"I'm a comic book junkie, I love, love, love comic books. Of all of the super hero characters the Thing is by far my favorite."

Any plans for a Marvel game? Not yet. Would he want to? Most definitely.

Spector added that he's also still like to make a video game based on the Golden Compass.

I think that's something we'd all like to see.

"I've had some discussions with people and really, really want to see some comics and cartoons and feature animation built around this," he Spector told Kotaku. "There have been discussions about all sorts of things talking about other possibilities around this project.

"I really hope it's going to happen and I'm going to keep beating on that drum."

In Disney Epic Mickey, due out next fall, players will take on the role of a Mickey Mouse thrust into a dystopic world of his own accidental creation called The Cartoon Waste Land. Once there he will use a paint brush and thinner, controlled by the Wii's remote, to reshape the world while battling the animated creations inside.

Spector told Kotaku that he isn't worried about bringing the game only to the Wii, despite the relative failures other third-party developers have seen on the platform.

"I think there is always a risk," he said. "The nintendo games are fantastic and do extremely well and third-party don't do quite as well.

"We are putting a lot of muscle behind this. We have an advantage that no one has. You say Mickey and Disney and the whole world changes, everything changes. If anyone has a chance of really delivering something special on the Wii, Nintendo-level special, it's us."

Spector says that he has every intention, Disney has every intention, of this game becoming an established and beloved franchise.

"I certainly have big plans," he said. "Have they been approved? No. But I have had a lot of discussions about what is going to happen next. In my mind it's already a franchise."

Succeed or fail, Spector and his team aren't holding anything back on this game.

"I really can't abide the thought that it will be OK or mediocre," he said. "We are going after Mario and Zelda, Ratchet and Clank, we all aspire to that.

"I don't always succeed, but we're always shooting for the moon," he said. "I'm a man of many motos and one of them is fail gloriously."

Instead the reinvention of Disney's animated world will strive to both entice children and enlighten adult with a meaty, moralistic story, famed game designer Warren Spector told Kotaku today.

In Disney Epic Mickey, gamers take on the role of an edgier Mickey Mouse, using the Wii remote to wield magical paint and thinner to reshape the around them. Mickey uses these abilities as he fights his way through a cartoon wasteland in what Disney describes as an "adventure-platforming game with light role-playing elements."

Spector says that the game won't support the Wii Remote's MotionPlus technology because the technology became available to developers too late to the studio.

"We played with it and I think that it would be a great fit for our core mechanic, but the best I can say is that in the future we'd love to do more with it," he said.

In the game's fiction Yen Sid, the sorcerer first seen in 1940's Fantasia during The Sorcerer's Apprentice, creates a Cartoon Wasteland for Disney's forgotten and retired creations. The first inhabitant of this wasteland is Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Walt Disney's first cartoon star created in 1927.

As the years pass Oswald starts to resent Mickey's growing fame. When Disney's mouse accidentally warps Oswald's Cartoon Wasteland by spilling paint thinner on it, Mickey is drawn into the warped world.

"Having Warren combine creativity and innovation with one of the world's most famous characters takes Mickey back to his creative roots and allows fans to deepen their engagement with him as a character – especially in video games," said Graham Hopper, executive vice president and general manager of Disney Interactive Studios.

Spector says that he was drawn to the idea of working on this tale of Disney fiction both because it was a chance to "mess around with one of the world's most recognizable icons" and a chance to tell a story that is interesting to both children and adults.

"We are telling a story in this game that is more sophisticated than save the princess or you are the last space marine on Earth," Spector said. "I think what you will find is that there is some commentary about consumerism and what is truly important in life.

"If I went much further than that it would be the height of pretension."

But, Spector admits, there are some allusions in the game to T.S. Elliots' modernist and deeply influential poem The Waste Land.

In the Waste Land a hero is drawn to a kingdom made sterile by the wounding of its king. To restore the king and the land, the hero must go on a quest. The concept of the poem draws on prevalent proto-themes like the Grail legend.

And while Spector, who started his career as an academic, admits that he's aware of the potential connection, he doesn't want people to draw too many connections.

"You have to throw in literary references every once in awhile," he said.

What seems to have influenced Spector more is a children's book author who deals with heady ideas like theology, philosophy and John Milton's Paradise Lost.

"What Philip Pullman does is inspiration in everything I want to do,"he said. "You can make something that appeals to kids but is interesting to adults as well.

In December 2007, Spector wrote on his blog about how much he would love to create a game based on Pullman's Golden Compass. At the time he was already in the midst of working on Disney Epic Mickey, he said.

"I had my first discussion with Disney in September 2005, then boring business stuff happened and then we did concept art and then we separated for awhile and came back together," he said.

In September 2007 Disney acquired Spector's studio, Junction Point Studios, which was well into game concept work.

I asked Spector if creating a game based on such a beloved and widely known character had satisfied the itch he expressed in his blog about Golden Compass.

"To some extent it did," he said. "But if you ever stop itching it's time to retire.

"I think getting the opportunity to play in the playground that Disney offers, that is what this opportunity is really about for me."

"When you say you're messing with Mickey Mouse people's eyes really light up."

While Spector's vision of Mickey seems to be darker than the character's most recognizable appearances, there are still lines the game won't be crossing.

"There are lines, lines you don't want to cross," he said. "When you talk about Mickey Mouse, people are like 'Give him a gun, give him a knife,'" he said. "I don't want to do that. Why would you want to do that?

"There are lines you don't cross. I discovered there are lines that (Mickey Mouse) used to cross that are now uncrossable. He did some pretty crazy stuff, but nowadays times have changed."

What Mickey will be doing in the game is allowing gamers to make moral decisions about how to change the world around them with paint and thinner. Those decisions will have consequences that affect the environment, interactions with other characters, and even Mickey's appearance and abilities.

"The core of this game is the idea of choice and consequence, and how that defines both the character and the player," Spector wrote in a prepared statement. "By putting the mischievous Mickey in an unfamiliar place and asking him to make choices – to help other cartoon characters or choose his own path – the game forces players to deal with the consequences of their actions. Ultimately, players must ask themselves, ‘What kind of hero am I?' Each player will come up with a different answer."

The initial concept for the Wii-exclusive game was born at Disney Interactive Studios' Think Tank, Spector told Kotaku.

"The idea of a wasteland with lost characters, Oswald's return, the Phantom Blog, that stuff existed, that core was there when they pitched it to me," Spector said. "They were all sitting there showing me this stuff in Power Point saying 'You don't have to do all of this, you can ignore it' and I thought 'Why would I ignore this, it's fantastic.'"

While the heart of the idea came from the Think Tank, the way the game and its look evolved is all Spector and his team.

The team spent huge amounts of time in Disney's many vast archives, pulling concept art and files.

"I'm a research junkie," Spector said. "I started out as an academic and film historian so I had shelves and shelves and shelves of books and articles. I came into this with a good background. But Disney has amazing resources. I spent a bunch of time out there digging through files."

During one of his earliest visits Spector was shocked to have one of the archivists apologize for having only scanned 90,000 images so far.

"Honestly, you could spend days digging through the stuff we dug out of the archives."

One thing that surprisingly didn't inspire Disney Epic Mickey was Square-Enix' hugely popular role-playing game Kingdom Hearts.

"I played the Kingdom Hearts games, but they weren't much of an inspiration," Spector said. "They treated the Disney characters much more conventionally than I wanted to.

"They are not reintroducing or reimagining as much as they are offering these characters as folks you are going to interact with in a new medium."

Spector was coy about how much inspiration the game developers are drawing from the Disney theme parks.

"You might sort of, kind of recognize some scenes," he said. "I don't want to give too much away."

The designer, best known for making games like Deus Ex and Thief, said that he wasn't worried about moving from typically adult-themed games to one that may be viewed as being more for children or families.

"When this opportunity arose I had to decide, do I want to keep working on this original stuff I've been doing or do I want to mess around with one of the world's most recognizable icons," he said. "The opportunity to work with something this recognizable and profound comes around once in a lifetime. The decision was pretty straight forward.

"I'm not making a game for kids, I'm making a game gamers will be happy with."

We've already been told that this Wii exclusive game will be all about Mickey painting in parts of his environment to get through levels (a la Okami, perhaps). But something I hadn't heard until today was that how you problem-solve your way through the game directly affects how your Mickey looks.

"How you decide to play the game should make a difference. You get to determine what kind of hero you are. Everybody solves the problem. Everybody saves the day. Everybody gets to save the world and gets the girl," Warren Spector tells us, in regards to the shifting spectrum of play styles that change the appearance of Mickey throughout the game. "But how you do it, and how you end up looking is up to you. What abilities you have is up to you. Who likes you is up to you. What missions you hear about or not is up to you." Each version of Mickey has a distinct look crafted by the character artists at Mickey, from the crouching and feral scrapper to the stalwart hero.

Each of the Mickeys and all of their movements, though, are drawn directly from classic Mickey inspiration. Get a look at the render videos in Game Informer's piece and see if you can recognize motions from old school Mickey Mouse cartoons, like The Brave Little Taylor.

Inside the Game: Epic Mickey [Game Informer]

Game Informer, as part of their epic Epic Mickey coverage, reconfirm that the game is a Wii "exclusive." Given that the game appears to feature a mechanic that's reliant on motion control, rumored to let Mickey Mouse paint and erase the environment, how could it possibly come to anything else?

Epic Mickey Coming Exclusively To Wii [Game Informer]

Disney's Epic Mickey is also the subject of the latest issue of GameInformer magazine, which should appear in subscribers' mailboxes starting next week.

The Wii game, said to be a Mickey Mouse platformer that involves the painting and erasing of levels, a struggle by Disney's lower caste of characters to dethrone the mouse.

Based on the cover art from the latest GI, it looks that, if anything, Spector and crew have managed to create something visually intriguing, with the rumored gameplay mechanics only slightly less interesting.

GI also has a video interview with Spector up, in which he talks about his love for things Mickey Mouse. It's light on actual Epic Mickey game details, but heavy on Spector face time.

Warren Spector & Mickey Mouse [GameInformer]

According to their sources, the game is indeed a Wii exclusive, and you will "paint your way through levels using the Wii Remote", doing things like drawing and erasing "whole parts of levels".

It'll be based around a story where Disney's lesser, forgotten characters rise up against Mickey, which would explain the emphasis on hot military action seen in the game's concept art.

Bear in mind we've yet to receive any kind of word on this game from Disney, so you may want to take it with a pinch of salt. Well, this info, at any rate; we're pretty sure the art is for real.

Epic Mickey details arise [CVG]

Headline kind of gives it away. The resume of another guy who's working on the game, Tony Pulham, says it's for the Wii. And since he's a concept designer, not a programmer or level artist, that makes it sound like there's only a Wii version.

Hopefully Nintendo's machine, and the team at Junction Point, can do that concept art justice.

[via Superannuation]

The website of concept artist Fred Gambino (via Superannuation) has some pieces for a project called "Epic Mickey", described as an "interactive game". Which just so happens to be the same codename from the Gamasutra article. Interesting!

Most interesting is the fact the artwork on Gambino's site differs from that described in the original Gamasutra piece, meaning we've got some bonafide corroboration going on here, making the whole thing feel awfully legitimate to us.

It's unclear what the status of this project is at the moment, or what the final game will actually play like (though rumours suggest it's a platformer), but we certainly like the direction it's taking, incorporating not just Disney characters, but the theme parks as well. A floating Epcot Center dreadnaught, complete with Monstro hull and Steamboat propulsion, is something we never thought we'd see, but are super-glad we did.

Fredgambino [via Superannuation]

UPDATE - cuyahoga over on GAF has done a little more digging, and found the portfolio (always with the artist portfolios!) of Gary Glover, who it seems is also/has worked on the game. Among his pics is this jaw-dropping beach landing scene, which was described in the original Gamasutra article.

The luminaries this year are Will Wright, Brian Fargo, David Perry, Neil Young, Rob Pardo and Warren Spector. The talk will be chaired by Gary White.

Follow along with the fly-on-the-wall observation of the chat in the live blog.

Gamasutra writes that it has seen concept art and other details on the title, now in development at Spector's own Junction Point Studios, which was acquired by Disney in 2007. Their description of the environmental artwork certainly sounds in line with Spector's style.

As the report points out, EGM's Quartermann-penned rumor column placed Spector on a Disney licensed platformer starring Mickey Mouse earlier this year.

Scoff if you want at the concept of Spector squandering his talent on a Mickey Mouse game, but go play Castle of Illusion for the Genesis before you do so.

Report: Spector's Junction Point Working On 'Epic Mickey' Title? [Gamasutra]

My team and I have been working hard on our own and (get ready for the cool factor to go way up) in collaboration with folks from Disney Feature Animation and Pixar. If I say anymore, I’ll get in trouble, so let’s just leave it at that.

Yes, Warren, the cool factor just went up by about as far as a Disney games-related coolfactorometer can go.

I’m ba-ack…[Warren Spector's Blog]

One-hundred-hour games are on the way out. How many of you have finished GTA? Two percent, probably. If we're spending $100 million on a game, we want you to see the last level!

Two things: firstly, he's not advocating everyone go casual. Just...if you're making a SP game, don't make one that's SUPER-long, OK? Secondly...he's wrong. While the gaming market is currently expanding, it's not changing. Difference being, people aren't walking away from games like Oblivion to go play Wii Fit. Those guys are still out there, and they still want big, SP games. Be a shame if developers stopped making them.

Spector: 'One Hundred Hour Games Are On The Way Out' [Gamasutra]

Today Spector explains. Turns out you should never sign photo released without reading them first.

Spector says he did a photo shoot for Wired Magazine a couple of years ago with a freelance photographer. The photographer had him sign what he thought was a typical release, but in fact gave her the right to "sell my image to anybody she wants, any time, for any purpose. Without my permission."

One signature and several years later and Spector has shown up in a Microsoft web ad for a some software he's never heard of (ficticious quote included), and now a Time mag piece about how to age well. Spector is taking the obnoxious shenanigans of this photographer quite well too.

Oh, and as a note, I've had NONE of the procedures and done none of the stuff the article talks about. I mean, I work out two or three times a week, but as you can tell by looking at the photos, I was between trainers when the Time photo was taken!

I guess it's cool, in some sense of the word "cool" to be part of a stock image library. Immortality is mine at last (sort of)!

Yes, That's Me on Page 55 of Time Magazine [Junction Point]

Holy cow, do I love the Wii and DS. I am a Nintendo freak right now! It's partly because where I am in my life; games for families, trying to make people smile. Who's doing that? Nintendo. The tone of the games, the audience they attract... I'm loving it. But look at games on the PS3 and Xbox 360! They look gorgeous. So there are attractions to every platform.

I think to succeed at this point, given the cost of making a game, and given the competition, I think that every game has to appeal to people who don't know who Warren Spector or Will Wright or... again, I'm not putting myself in that category. I describe myself as the bargain basement Will Wright, the Wal-Mart version of Peter Molyneux. But none of us are a big enough game to sell enough copies to justify the cost.

In a sort-of-aside to a gush about The Golden Compass movie and novel, Warren Spector mentions that he wanted to make the game based on the novels "long before the film came out."

It's just an aside, but it raises some interesting issues, ones I'm not totally prepared to go on and on about, so I'll make this short. I requested a copy of the game because I'm hoping to play through it to see how the game makers dealt with the touchy subject of religion that is very much central to the entire His Dark Materials trilogy. In fact I read the trilogy over the first week of my vacation in Australia, just for that reason. But things were crazy in December and I haven't had a chance to crack the game open. Hopefully, I'll be doing that soonish.

What intrigues me is how exactly Warren Spector would have worked with the subject matter. Judging by his enthusiasm for the trilogy and his obvious knowledge of it, I suspect it could have resulted in a deeply evocative game, the sort of title that may have touched on the issues brought up in the series and, much more importantly, made gamers think about something that makes them quite uneasy. It's really a shame he didn't follow through on his desire... or wasn't allowed to.

The Man Who Hates the World, Part 2 [Warren Spector's Blog]

Sounds like famed game developer Warren Spector is winding down. In a recent interview with Eurogamer he bemoaned the amount of energy it takes to make games these days and said he probably only has three to five left in him before he shuffles off this mortal coil.

"Game development requires an intense amount of energy," Spector, who is 52 years old, told Eurogamer in an interview published today. "It requires a level of focus and dedication and belief and confidence and time. What it means, in an ideal world, I may work on five more games in my entire life. More likely probably three given how long they take."

Spector went on to cast doubts on Deus Ex 3, saying that he hasn't yet spoken to Eidos Montreal about the game and that he's concerned about how it's going to turn out because it's a "delicate" game style.

Sounds like someone gets grumpy during the holidays.

Warren Spector may only work on three more games ever [Eurogamer]