In an interview with gamesindustry after receiving the LifeTime Achievement Award at this year’s GDC, Warren Spector, Vice President and Creative Director at Disney Interactive, gave some insight on his work at Disney but more importantly, some interesting information on Epic Mickey 2′s development.

For the next instalment in Disney’s platformer, production has grown vastly in comparison to their previous work. “With Mickey 1, we built a team – we went from 13 people to about 180″, Spector pointed out before going on to claim, “we have over 700 people around the world working on our new game now.” To put this in perspective, around 200 people worked on Modern Warfare 3 and around 600 are working on Resident Evil 6.

Amongst some details surrounding improvement over the first Epic Mickey, concerning camera work, new voice acting, accessibility and co-op gameplay, Spector mentioned why this video game is a major project for Disney. When talking about how well the game did, the game developer claimed that, “it did exceptionally well for Disney. It was the best-selling single-platform game the company has ever done.” The title sold around 2 million copies in North America and Europe, of which 1.2 million were sold in the US alone.

Although Spector believes, due to the market Mickey targets, the Wii was the logical platform to launch on, however he went on to explain, “Disney is one of the few companies around that I think has the capability, the talent, the assets, the bank account to really deliver on the gaming everywhere plan.”

Seeing that Warren Spector addresses some of the major complaints from their previous Mickey platformer and how Disney appears to have a high interest in making Epic Mickey 2 a success, I look forward to see if some life can be breathed into 3D platformers, just as the N64 and PSone once did.

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