‘Skylanders Imaginators’ will let you create and 3D print your own action figure
There’s a good chance you’ve plunked down some cash over the years for a “Skylanders” toy to support your kid’s (or your own) financially unhealthy fascination with Activision’s blockbuster toys-to-life franchise.
But for all their colorful style, “Skylanders” toys have been missing a key ingredient: you. Designed primarily by core series developer Toys for Bob, each “Skylander” springs forth from the creative minds of its development team, not your own weird imagination.
That’s about to change.
The next game in the series, “Skylanders Imaginators”, will not only allow players to create their own heroic virtual creature, but thanks to a combination of killer tech and deep pockets, Activision and Toys for Bob will actually allow them to turn that digital beast into a real-world object. That’s right – you can finally make your own Skylander.
Here’s how it works. “Skylanders Imaginators” plays much like the other games in the series, tasking players with guiding odd creatures through an adventure to take down the evil Kaos. This time, however, they’ll collect body parts in addition to other baubles. They can then use those parts to build their own Skylander, mixing and matching arms, legs, heads and even voices to craft their personal monster.
Plenty of other games do that, of course, but what happens next will, as the clickbait goes, surprise you.
Using the free Skylanders Creator mobile app, players can continue to tweak their Skylander on the go by moving it from console to smartphone through audio data transfer. You simply stick the phone next to the console, press a button, and gape in astonishment as your PS4 or Xbox One rattles off an R2D2-like series of chirps, bloops and beeps, which your phone then captures like, well, C3PO. In a matter of seconds, your Skylander is on your phone for further tweaking – no logins required.
The tech — called ‘Chirp’ — has existed for some time, but according to Toys for Bob CEO Paul Reiche III, no one really thought to use it.
“It’s a technology we licensed but doesn’t get used very much…we looked at it and fiddled with it and worked with that company to grow it some so it could do what we wanted,” he said in an interview. “And it has the side effect of kind of being cute, which is not often something you can say about network communications.”
Cute is right. And that’s just Part One of “Imaginators’ ” character-to-life process.
Once the Skylander is on your smartphone, you can fork over some cash ($49.99) to have Activision turn it into a legit “Skylanders” toy using a 3D printing process similar to what Toys for Bob used for the first two “Skylanders” games. Encased in a clear plastic dome, the fully colored figure will be in whatever pose you sent to Activision, and can be whisked into the video game through the portal of power just like any other Skylander.
The catch? Activision will only allow a limited quantities of these figures. Reiche points out that if everyone who played the game could make toys “we’d outstrip the 3D printing technology of the world.” So exactly how many is “limited?” Activision wouldn’t say, though they plan on giving some away through promotions and contests.
Even if you can’t score a statue, you can transform your creation into an “Imaginators” trading card ($14.99) that functions just like the toy, or even slap its mug on a t-shirt ($24.99).
“I don’t know if any other game yet has quite entered into the physical creation, supply-chain, programming like this,” Reiche says. “We didn’t accept any reasonable limitations. We wanted more than just creating a character in a virtual environment. We wanted it to come back and live. Having physical artifacts to look at matters.”
Having a franchise sell well matters, too, and depending on who you ask, the once robust toys-to-life genre is either flailing or fine. Disney Interactive’s once-lucrative “Disney Infinity” series, the chief rival of “Skylanders”, was surprisingly cancelled in May due to poor Q1 earnings and questionable long-term profitability. Some analysts and pundits believe the genre has peaked.
Reiche isn’t among them.
“Someone once asked me ‘are toys that come to life a passing fad?’ And I said, ‘So is the option toys that don’t do anything are cool?’ Because that doesn’t sound better to me, under any circumstances. There will always be new cool things that toys can do in games, but games aren’t going away, and toys aren’t going away, and that intersection will continue.”
But sales of last year’s “Skylanders Superchargers” came in lower than expected. Coupled with Disney’s demise and uncertainty about second-year performance of fellow toys-to-life effort “Lego Dimensions,” the horizon isn’t exactly bright, though as analyst Michael Pachter pointed out to USA Today, the hole left by “Disney Infinity” could lead to higher year-over-year sales for the other toys-to-life games.
To lifelong creature creator Rieche (whose credits include seminal hits like “Archon,” “Mail-Order Monsters,” “Star Control 2” and even an official “Dungeons and Dragons” beast), there’s simply no telling what’s in store.
“Honestly we don’t know what the future’s like, because we’ve been sitting at the front of the development of this,” he said. “There’s never been a track record in front of us. We’ve faced all the way through it people saying ‘Oh, this is genius, or ‘Oh, this will never work,’ so we just build something in our hearts that we can carry forward and deliver on.”
“If we can capture people’s imaginations and give them a neat place to go and fun stuff to do, I think that defines the trend instead of following it.”
“Skylanders Imaginators” hits shelves October 13. The Creation app arrives in North America three days later.
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Ben Silverman is on Twitter at ben_silverman.