"Let me start by saying, I have never, and I will never, make a design change as a result of a focus test. It has not happened at any point in my 27 years, and it will not happen. I will quit if that happens -- if you ever catch me doing that, that will be last thing I ever do in the games business, okay?
What I have done, is about three years ago when we first started thinking about this, we did over a thousand versions of Mickey -- I'm assuming this is where this started. So we did a focus test because I had a thousand different looks for the character, and people just said, 'don't mess with Mickey.' When you make a game, you make this creative box, and you try to figure out what fits in the box. You can do anything with Mickey Mouse or any character. So I said, 'let's test the extremes,' and there were things that were too radical. Game fans, Mickey fans, they didn't want to go that far.
So three years ago, I said, 'Alright, that's too radical; we're not going to go that far with Mickey.' And I think I mentioned that at E3, and someone assumed that that happened this past Christmas. And so, 'Warren Spector got rid of the Scrapper because of a focus test!' And it's not true. The idea of the Scrapper Mickey went away because I didn't like it. There was no focus test. If there were any focus tests done last fall, no one ever told me they were happening or gave me any data about it." - Warren Spector
Spector sounds pretty heated on this issue. I always thought that focus-testing and Disney prodding lead to the removal of the Scrapper Mickey design, but I guess that's not the case. That's not all that Spector had to say on the topic, either. You can check out his full response here.
