Talking mobile games with Disney's Sunil Gunderia

It doesn't take long to find out Disney Mobile is working on a new mobile game based on Cars, as well as an action-adventure game based on Super Don, the alter ego of Donald Duck.

Although he doesn't say any more about them than that, Disney's Sunil Gunderia has plenty of thoughts on the company's other activities, not to mention its successful 2007, where it's enjoyed critical plaudits and strong sales alike. Not only that, Disney has also been investing in its own internal studio in Prague and China, joining its existing Living Mobile team in Germany.

"We're focused on becoming a high-quality game developer," says Gunderia. "We're really thinking about the gameplay, and about what players want. It's about creating games with mass-market appeal that are accessible to all members of the family."

That said, Disney is still looking to pick up cool game ideas from independent developers, with the excellent puzzler Critter Crunch an example of that policy in action. Often, when someone comes to Disney with a good game, the company will see if its gameplay can be adapted to fit one of the famous Disney characters or franchises.

"It may be new IP, but if we're able to use an overarching Disney brand, clearly we'll look to do that," he says. "So we have a great treasure trove of our own brands to work with, including things like High School Musical, but then if we can discover some great gameplay that can stand alone as its own brand, like Critter Crunch, or live within a Disney brand, then that's great too."

Gunderia is positive about the mobile games market in general, although like all his rivals, he'd like to see more people downloading games for their phones, rather than just playing what's preloaded on them. Disney is, unsurprisingly, not just looking to target hardcore gamers to achieve this.

"Often, it's first-time digital gamers," he says. "The audience we see out there are people who still play sudoku with a pencil and paper. We're trying to provide them with an alternative that's much more satisfying – so for sudoku, there's no erasing or tears in your paper. The more people who don't even know they're gamers that we bring in, the better."

This includes a strong focus on making mobile games easier to play, and specifically, easier to pick up and play, without having to read the instructions.

It's a trend that Pocket Gamer has noticed among other publishers, such as Gameloft's slick first-level tutorials that introduce all a game's controls in the first five minutes of play. Disney is on a similar drive. "I'd really like to get to a point where people never need to look at a help screen," says Gunderia.

"It should be basically in-game and tutorial-based, although you should be able to turn it off if you're experienced. We have to assume that the people we're targeting may not have even tried a racing or platform game before, so we have to make it easy for them, to increase their level of enjoyment. Bomberman is a great example of what we're trying to do there."

Ah, Bomberman. A superb mobile game, as you'll know if you read our recent review. Gunderia says that besides making it as accessible as possible, Disney worked hard with brand owner Hudson Soft to ensure hardened Bomberman fans would love the title, not least with its Bluetooth multiplayer mode.

"We knew from looking at reviews of previous Bomberman games that people were thinking, 'This would be perfect for multiplayer'," he says. "It's Bluetooth because latency still exists on networks for true multiplayer, but we do know if you have two people sitting next to each other, they're not necessarily concerned about the network. They just want to play."

That said, Disney is working on connected mobile games, although it's thinking beyond real-time multiplayer. The company has launched WAP-based communities for several games in the last year, and plans to expand on this in 2008.

"We're absolutely looking to create connected experiences, so we're starting with leaderboards, but internally we are developing technologies to allow level downloads, or prizes like getting a free wallpaper," he says. "It's connectivity around the gameplay."

That isn't the limit to Disney's WAP ambitions, either. Many people have spent the last few years saying that WAP is, well, rubbish. Yet it seems there could be a comeback for WAP in the gaming field.

"WAP was a bad word for a long time, but you can create fun experiences using it," says Gunderia. "We created a quiz game for High School Musical that was a relatively simple WAP-based quiz, but it was fun and appropriate for the audience."

So, an undeniably successful 2007 for Disney Mobile. But like any company, its sights are very much set on what's ahead, not back. With that mentality and its proven ability to date, we look forward to seeing what the publisher has in store for us over the next 12 months.