A portion of a 5-page Gamasutra interview with 5th Cell's Jeremiah Slaczka...

GS: How did this Scribblenauts idea come to be? To me, it sounds like the kind of thing that someone would be like, "Wouldn't it be cool if?" "Yeah, but that's too hard." "Oh well."

Jeremiah Slaczka: The cool thing is after Drawn to Life, we had a couple more pitches I wanted to do. One was Lock's Quest. And then I had another idea about writing.

What if you could write Mad Lib style, where you could write sentences, and they would come to life in the top screen? I would say, "The dog is walking through the forest," and the dog would pop down and the forest, and he would walk through. I thought to myself, "That's a really cool idea."

The problem is there's no gameplay. It was crazy -- I actually had a dream. I never dream of video game ideas. But I had a dream where I was in this Aztec temple, and you go in this room. In every room, there'd be these weird puzzles. In one there were three paintings hanging on the wall and you have to make them straight. And then you get down and open the portal to the next room.

I thought, "This is a really cool idea for a game, but it doesn't have a hook, and there's no replayability." I was kind of working on that and seeing where that would go, like, maybe that would fit on Wii. Maybe that would fit on DS. I don't know. Then I though, "Wait. What if we take the writing idea and slam it with the puzzle idea, and all of the sudden you've got instant replayability because you could write anything."

Then I talked to Marius, our technical director, and he was like, "Yeah, dude, this is awesome. Let's do it." And he was really pumped. He was the one that actually loved the writing. Before that I didn't know where it was going. It was boring at the moment. It's wasn't a game. It was just an idea.