Disney and Hipster Whale team up for a Crossy Road crossy-over
Disney has released a trailer for an upcoming collaboration that sees Disney and Pixar characters playing in traffic.
Crossy Road, launched by Australian developer Hipster Whale in November 2014, was a runaway hit, garnering 50 million downloads in its first 90 days. Now Disney is getting in on the Frogger-inspired action.
Disney Games today announced the collaboration on social media, with a teaser video showing a voxelised Mickey Mouse trying to dodge traffic.
"Move over Chicken, there are new road crossers in town! From Hipster Whale and Disney comes Disney Crossy Road -- an all-new take on the 8-bit endless adventure to cross the road without splatting," the video description reads.
The collaboration seems a strange one for Disney conceptually, as the game is predicated on characters being smooshed by cars. It seems a natural one for Hipster Whale, who breathed fresh life into Namco's Pac-Man with Pac-Man 256.
According to Matt Hall, the game has been in development for around a year. Considering that Crossy Road only took 12 weeks to develop, he said, it felt unusual, but he was confident that the time was well spent.
"We never expected Crossy Road to get as big as it did, so we had to sort of fix it as we went," he said. "We used this as an opportunity to fix everything that was wrong with Crossy Road. It's going to be a better game."
Only Mickey is shown in the trailer, so we don't know how far into the world of Disney the new game will delve (as far as Star Wars? Princesses? Duck Tales?). However, there will be at least 100 Disney and Pixar characters, and nine Disney- and Pixar-themed environments with their own soundtracks, in addition to the standard Crossy Road world. Hall also confirmed that each of these worlds will have its own rules, and not all of them will involve the game's ubiquitous cars and logs.
A launch date has also not yet been given, with the trailer only mentioning that the game is coming "soon." However, interested players can follow the game's Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts for updates. If you already have Crossy Road, you can also now download an update with a free Mickey Mouse outfit for the chicken, inspired, Hall said, by the Mickey Mouses hidden around Disneyland.
The game will be released on iOS, Android, Windows Phone and the Amazon Appstore.