The iPad Game That Took 9 Years (And an Epic Disney Fail) to Finish

Edgar, a mild-mannered window washer, is daydreaming of the girl he loves. In his dream, they meet in a nightclub straight out of Casablanca, flirting from across the room.

The scene, lovingly rendered in hand-drawn animation on an iPad, is controllable: By swiping your finger right or left, you can control the boldness of Edgar’s flirting. Swipe too hard and Edgar will gyrate wildly, causing her to recoil in terror. But swipe slowly, and Edgar will ease on the charm, pantomiming some smooth dance moves that win him the girl of his dreams.

The Act, released last month for iOS, is a game with a remarkable history. Development on the game began over nine years ago and involved dozens of former Disney animators that had worked on films like Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. Its animation was created the old-school way: pens and paper. And after The Act was completed, it came very, very close to never coming out at all.

The seed of The Act was planted in Omar Khudari’s mind in 1986. A computer programmer for an educational gaming company, Khudari was looking for the next big thing. He was fascinated by Dragon’s Lair, the arcade game that used animation by Don Bluth stored on a LaserDisc. But the game didn’t live up to his expectations.

“It looked like a movie, but it didn’t seem like [one] when you were playing it,” said Khudari. The player wasn’t involved in the story, he just pressed buttons to make Dragon’s Lair‘s hero jump and dodge.

That year, Khudari went to Seattle to attend Microsoft’s First International Conference On the CD-ROM, where technology innovators gathered to discuss what might be done with the exciting new medium. One of the keynote speeches was delivered by Stan Cornyn, a legend in the music business. He was one of the first employees of Warner Bros. Records upon its founding in 1958, and had won multiple Grammy awards for the liner notes he penned for Frank Sinatra. Of late, he was the founder of its fledgling Warner New Media division, which was soon to introduce the innovative but ill-fated CD+G technology that embedded computer graphics onto audio CDs.

Cornyn spoke of the future of media convergence, the possibilities of interactive storytelling that would be enabled with this new technology. Khudari, sitting in the audience, was struck by one particular turn of phrase: “It’ll be like going to the movies with a steering wheel.”

The Warner executive was speaking metaphorically, but Khudari thought about it literally.

“My favorite movie was Casablanca,” he said in a 2008 interview. “That was about love and honor and faith and betrayal. How could you turn a wheel and make love and honor and faith and betrayal happen?”

It would be a few years before Khudari got to answer that question. In the meantime, he made money. He partnered with another employee of the educational software company to form Papyrus Design Group, a game development studio that he sold to Sierra On-Line in 1995. He invested the money and made more. In 2003, he decided to open the game studio that he’d use to create his emotional love story with a steering wheel. He named the company Cecropia, after a type of tree that has a habit of spreading rapidly in otherwise barren places.

The Act, as Khudari envisioned it, would be an arcade game cabinet with a single control — a dial that could be turned left or right; Cornyn’s metaphorical “steering wheel” made physical. It would be a linear love story without branching paths, which Khudari calls “a novelty that the world pretty much doesn’t want.” Linear stories, he thought, were more satisfying.

The game would allow players to adjust the on-screen character’s behavior by twisting a knob either clockwise or counterclockwise. The first scene that Khudari and his team designed was the flirtation at the bar. Players had to watch the girl’s facial expressions and body language, backing off when she appeared hesitant and turning on the charm if she seemed receptive to Edgar’s goofy come-ons. Other scenes were more complex: In one, Edgar had to alternate between encouraging his slacker brother to keep washing windows while placating his boss on the other side of the screen, the player gently turning the dial back and forth with the correct timing, but not too hard or soft.

Work on the game progressed slowly. While Cecropia had enough software engineers to build the program that would flip between the different loops of animation, he didn’t have enough animators who could work at the level of quality he needed. Hand-drawn 2-D animation was becoming a thing of the past.

Fortunately for Cecropia, that’s exactly what Disney was beginning to think.

In 2004, Disney announced to the great chagrin of its fans that it was shuttering its Orlando animation studio, which had produced films like Mulan and Lilo and Stitch, and laying off its 250 employees. The pioneers of 2-D animation were effectively giving up on it, and hundreds of the country’s most talented animators were out of work.

Khudari sat down for lunch with Anthony Michaels, one of the artists who had brought the Mulan character to life with ink and paint. Like a music enthusiast with a fondness for vinyl, Michaels wasn’t ready to give up on 2-D animation.

“I like a lot of 3-D movies, and I like the Pixar stuff, but when I watch those movies I always see little things like ‘oh, when they walk it looks stiff,’” he says.

Over lunch, Khudari explained to him one of the animations he was trying to nail in The Act, a scene in which Edgar sat at a table, dressed as a doctor, and flirted with the nurse. He couldn’t get the right emotions to come through.

Michaels grabbed a napkin and drew a sketch. “You mean like this?” he said. The drawing, Khudari recalls, was exactly what he wanted. Khudari called Disney’s human resources department and starting hiring the animators one by one.

“That company spoiled me,” says Michaels. “With Disney … you have no real freedom,” he said, but Cecropia was “an animator’s dream.”

The flaw in Cecropia’s plan was that Khudari planned to release the game into the mostly dead arcade game market. “It was already tanking, but I thought I could revive it,” he says.

Video arcades had mostly shut their doors by the mid-2000s. Khudari hoped to release The Act into bars, which still set up coin-operated machines for the amusement of their patrons. But that was harder than it seemed.

“In the tavern market, the location owners do not want to give up precious space to machines,” Khudari says. “Many will not allow machines at all, but those who do want one or at most two. So you have to be number 1 or number 2 to have a market of any significant size.”

So although many bar owners wanted the game Golden Tee Golf over by the dartboards, that was all they wanted.

By 2007, with The Act completed and ready to go, Khudari had given up on the impossible dream of releasing it as an arcade machine. He approached traditional console publishers like Nintendo, who were uninterested. In 2008, Khudari decided to bail out. Cecropia had already manufactured about 40 “conversion kits,” sets of parts that could be used to convert a standard arcade cabinet into The Act. They auctioned off 10 of them on eBay, gave the rest away to employees, and closed Cecropia.

Khudari says he doesn’t feel comfortable discussing exactly how much of his money he poured into The Act. “My kids would kill me if they knew how much of their inheritance was sunk in that game,” he said.

Arcade game enthusiasts built their The Act machines. Some would bring them to arcade game conventions, setting them up for other fans to try. Among those in the know, the rare game was something you had to experience, if you ever had the chance.

But The Act wasn’t entirely resigned to obscurity. In 2009, Daniel Kraus, head of a game development startup called React Entertainment, approached Khudari with the idea of porting his game to Apple’s iOS devices. Kraus thought that the simple steering-wheel controls would work well on a touch screen. Khudari was skeptical it would work but agreed. That year, React began the laborious process of converting the game to the iOS format.

The company had its work cut out for it. The Act’s individual scenes and frames were hand-drawn on paper and then scanned in using a traditional ink scanner, Kraus says. When the game was finished, he said, it comprised over 230,000 individual drawings.

“We have that pile of paper in Orlando,” Kraus says. “You wouldn’t believe the size of this thing.”

It would be another three years before The Act was finally released, published by Electronic Arts. The conversion hasn’t been a total success: Nearly every one of the game’s App Store reviews complain about the game’s short length, which would have been perfect for an arcade machine but falls short of expectations for a mobile game.

“I paid $3 for a game I beat in 30 minutes,” said reviewer Shorewire. “It was a cool concept and I enjoyed it but I expected many more ‘acts.’”

Kraus says that React Entertainment can provide more. “We’ve been able to see now that people love this sort of interactive animation,” he said. “With the advances in authoring technology, it’s possible to create, at a much faster speed, something that could be really compelling.”

Although Khudari is happy to see The Act finally available to the public, he is skeptical that something like it could be created again within a reasonable time frame, especially if it were to strive for the artistic beauty that he feels was achieved with The Act.

But, he says, “I’d be thrilled if I was proven wrong.”

 Source : wired.com