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IN THE MID 1990s, MOST OF THE MOVIE PRODUCTION HOUSES that were publishing or developing games made a semi-graceful exit from the industry. Buena Vista, as Disney's game publishing arm, was one of the few that stuck around. Now in its eleventh year, the company has made another shift, changing the name to Buena Vista Games, and changing the focus to the more core gamer. With the power of Disney behind them, and the acquisition of a few key individuals from established development houses, Buena Vista Games hopes to be a major industry player in both the short and long term. Senior vice president and general manager Graham Hopper spoke to Game Developer about Buena Vista's new initiatives in the core-gamer space.
Brandon Sheffield: How has Buena Vista evolved over the years, and what has prompted this renewed interest in the console gaming space?
Graham Hopper: Our business started about 10 years ago; in fact it was 10 years ago [as of December 2004] that Disney Interactive was formed, and it was predominantly a PC publisher for a long period of time. We did achieve a great deal of success on the PC platform, right throughout the 1990s. However, we have not been known as a significant console developer; we tended to license all that out, so we had sort of a dual model where we published certain things ourselves, mainly on the PC, and we licensed out the rest. Of course what we realized is that as the console market has become bigger and more valuable, there was a real opportunity for us to expand our business by starting to publish on console as well. So that was stage one of the evolution of our business, which went into motion in 2002 and 2003.
We started looking at different genres of products, as opposed to just the traditional Disney branded products. So for example, we worked with Monolith Studios on TRON 2.0, and we also started work with Capcom on developing a, shall we say, sequel to Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas. And again, we've started thinking about developing original properties. I think what we realized pretty quickly...