Interview: DuckTales Remastered, WayForward, Capcom and how it came together

It seems like only yesterday that DuckTales Remastered was announced and out of nowhere it’s out this week on the eShop!

Back in June at E3 we were lucky enough to sit down with WayForward’s Austin Ivansmith and Capcom USA’s Rey Jimenez to talk about the game. This interview was recorded on E3 show floor so its taken us this long to get it transcribed. Luckily you can just read.

DuckTales Remastered is being developed by WayForward who are famous for some great platforming titles we know, Capcom knew this too and approached the studio to make the game. Austin told us that they ‘immediately jumped at the chance’ to the do the game. Rey believes that Wayforward are ‘the best studio you could ever hope to do it’.

Wayforward are are not only fans of the game but also the original cartoon. Austin says that at the studio, the classic Capcom games are the staple of our their platformers they build and have ‘the rules of what makes a classic game’. Literally everyone at the studio, including the director Matt Bozon, is a huge fan of the show. Disney also has a strong love in the studio, we’re told most of the studio artists have learned ‘the Disney way’ at CalArts, its the place where Disney animators are trained. Austin believes that the crew at Wayforward have the Disney style in their blood. Not literally of course.

The game isn’t just authentic in its art style either, essentially the entire voice cast return – sadly some of the original crew have passed away. However Alan Young has returned to voice Scrooge and he is in his nineties, June Foray too is in her nineties and has returned as well. Russi Taylor who voices Huey, Dewey, and Louie hadn’t had the chance to do the voices for years, but loved doing them for the game. Austin tells us one experience with Alan Young who asked the team ‘Does that sound like what you imagined?’ when performing, gobsmacked they could reply with ‘Um.. yeah!’.

Like the original game DuckTales remastered has multiple difficulties, Austin tells us that the easy has been changed to be slightly easier than the original but the hard is ‘pretty much identical’ to the original game. ‘Now that we’re in our 20s and 30s you might play it and go, ‘Oh this is so much easier’, but this is also because we’re so much better at the game, you’re probably a better gamer then you were at 10 years old.’ That’s not to say the game is exactly the same either, the AI has been tweaked and the cheap mechanics of the NES version have been changed.

Some of the tweaks to the game include more checkpoints in the game, the original only had two per level and since Wayforward have made the levels slightly bigger they felt this would avoid the feeling of grinding away at a level. In fact about 40% of each level is new stuff, the original 60% of the game though is just as you remember it.

If you’re after a pure experience, the game offers an extreme difficulty that you unlock if you beat the game on hard. It has no save system, if you die its game over. You’ll basically need to leave your console on to do this mode, just like the old days.

Oh and the Money Bin is in the game too, don’t you worry. You can dive in it as well.

We asked both Austin and Rey would either company be open to doing another classic platforming remake. ‘We would love to, working on this game is of the most exciting things I’ve ever done, I hope DuckTales sell really well. It will increase the chances we’ll be able to more’.

Bonus: It’s not everyday you have someone from WayForward in the same room as you so we asked them about Mighty Switch Force 2, which when we did the interview was out in the US that day and when we might see it in Australia. 

’No Comment on Australia’ was the joke after brought it up. Damn our classification system.