Warren Spector hails Epic Mickey as 'a real labor of love', says he's got an idea for the third entry but the day job makes that 'impossible'

These days Disney has its fingers in everything, but not so long ago the company was firmly in its old lane of animation powerhouse and theme park operator. With videogames in particular, Disney struggled to do much beyond licensing its characters, perhaps the biggest success being the collaboration with Square Enix that resulted in the Kingdom Hearts series. 

In the mid-2000s something changed, and Disney decided to grasp the nettle and make its own big-budget game with its most iconic character: the House of Mouse had acquired Junction Point Studios, a dream team founded and headed up by Warren Spector, and Epic Mickey began.

The idea behind the game had been floating around Disney for a while (though it hinged on re-acquiring the rights to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit), and there was real passion behind it: Epic Mickey turned out to be one of those games where the artistry and concept just about make up for what's lacking in execution. And that's despite Disney eventually choosing to target the game at the all-conquering Wii platform, a beautiful console to be sure but one that saw Nintendo stubbornly sticking with SD as the rest of the industry transitioned into the HD era. The upcoming remaster, Epic Mickey: Rebrushed, will give this vision the fidelity it's always been screaming out for and likely bring it to a bigger audience than ever before.  

Warren Spector remains best-known for his work at Looking Glass Studios and on Deus Ex, so directing Epic Mickey was something of a change for him too. Spector's now posted about the announcement of the remaster on LinkedIn (first spotted by Nintendo Everything), paying tribute to the designers and the project as a whole.

«I can’t begin to describe how excited I am that Disney Epic Mickey is coming back on Switch and other platforms,» says Spector. «Everyone on the original team as well as the Purple Lamp and THQ Nordic teams that worked on the remaster did a great job bringing the game to life.

»The teams on that project