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Activision has been looking to let fans make their own Skylanders for quite some time

by rawmeatcowboy
03 October 2016
GN Version 5.0

A portion of a GamesBeat interview with Toys for Bob's Paul Reiche...

GamesBeat: Did you work on this for more than just this particular cycle? Did you have the idea going way back?

Reiche: We’ve had the idea of creating your own Skylanders for a while. But we needed to make sure we could do it well. Part of that was understanding the visual vocabulary of what a Skylander is. Having created enough Skylanders—we’ve created upwards of 200 here for our games. I think there are 300 or more out there. But we needed to create a wide enough range that we understood how to let players create characters that represented their interests, that were personal and unique, and fundamentally could look cool if they want.

They can be silly. They can be crazy. But you can create a really awesome, badass character if you choose to do so. We had to believe that we wouldn’t put all this work in here and then kids could only make dorky-looking characters. It took us until now, until this cycle, to believe that we could do it. And on top of it, we also believed that we needed to find a new avenue of innovation.

We’ve made a lot of great toys, a lot of great toys to life games, different categories of toys. We wanted to find something worthy of saying that the toys to life genre is moving forward. We take that personally, you know? We invented this genre and we want to keep it moving and alive and dynamic and have kids remain interested in it, wondering what will happen next year. This is everything we could bring.

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