Monsters, Inc. Scream Team
released on Oct 30, 2001
What would you say if you found out that the scary monsters hiding in children's closet were all part of a corporate conspiracy? Well, that's the premise of the 2001 Disney or Pixar film, Monsters, Inc., and it's the basis of this videogame for the PlayStation. Play as either Sully or Mike two of the monsters hired to scare little kids as you move from house to house, just trying to do your job. The company you work for is in the business of drumming up "scream energy," so you'll have to be extra frightening if you hope to succeed. Each of the game's 3D environments is detailed and expansive, representing the movie well, and there are dozens of hidden bonuses and power-ups that you can use toy your advantage.
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Como eu era muito pequeno (3/4 anos), eu não sabia o que era pra fazer depois de passar da 1° fase e vencer na corrida contra o Randall, já que abria vários mundos diferentes.
não lembro de nada mas eu sei que joguei isso em algum momento, tenho certeza que não zerei
Esse era ruim demais em kkkkkkkkkk
For a silly little tie-in game for the movie, it's still a blast to breeze through every now and then.
It was an ok tie-in children game. Mike was really fun to play ngl.
See, this is why I love playing and replaying these licensed games. There's a deceptive amount of stuff to analyze if you know what to ask about or look into.
Like, so, this game. Pretty basic 3D platformer. Three worlds, four levels per world, three medals per level, each medal requires spooping robot childrens or collecting coins. Some racing stages to break things up. Movie clips as a reward. Simple-simple, no great levels but some fun enough biomes and the occasional annoying-as-hell gimmick (that one dumb Nerve in "The Oasis" suuuuuuuuucks). GREAT animation - easily the highlight of the whole thing - and some decent vocal impersonators. I swear Mike Wazowski's "Not bad for a guy with ONE EYE!!!!" is a line I always forget wasn't delivered by Billy Crystal. Weirdly Mike Wazowski is way more fun to control due to getting a bounce, a roll, and a hover on top of Sulley's moveset. Otherwise pretty disposable title.
...this would be all I'd have to say if I wasn't curious about this game. But I am. Part of that's because I got the game new (for PC), and I've been thinking about the game for over 20 years. Part of that's how much I loved Monster's Inc., easily a runaway early favorite Pixar movie for me. But there are things that you think about, as a consequence of all that.
The premise, to begin with. The setup is decidedly not a direct adaptation, instead showing Sulley and Mike Wazowski training to become Scarers as a pseudo-prequel. Fine enough; contradicted by Monsters University, of course, but that was years later. However! If you've seen the movie, you'll remember that Mike Wazowski was not a Scarer, so logically, he shouldn't be out on the field scaring.
Then you start to think about other stuff. Like how the receptionist is the teacher character from the movie's opening rather than the expected Celia. Or how the worlds don't have much of anything to do with the movie's theming (why is there a Waternoose Sphinx???). Or how, in a game where you constantly unlock video clips, the game opens by showing the movie's teaser trailer, released a year before the movie came out...
So we don't get as many of these movie tie-in games any more, but for this era, it was common for these games to be developed in concert with the source material. So goes for all tie-in media, naturally; part of marketing a big release is getting in that multimedia marketing blitz. Part of THAT is coordinating different individuals and teams to work on different cross-media content, which means sharing details ahead of time to people.
In something like a movie with multimedia tie-ins, it comes down to the movie's production team on how and when they inform the other creative teams on what they need to know. This is why we sometimes see discrepancies with tie-in media. My go-to example for this is the novelization for the movie Alien. When Alan Dean Foster was hired to pen the novelization, he was given a working film script, three weeks, and no description of the Xenomorph's appearance. Foster did a great job working with what he was given, but this is why the novelization includes the deleted scene of Dallas being cocooned as well as a reference to the alien's "tentacle". Things Foster couldn't anticipate wouldn't exist in the final product, simply because he did not have access to the same information/creative direction that the film team had.
I mention all this because this appears to be transparently the case with Scream Team/Scare Island. The game came out before the movie, so Behaviour Interactive had to be working with prerelease info. The game's setup doesn't make sense with the tone of the movie, but it is in-line with the teaser trailer, which presents a proof-of-concept scenario where Mike and Sulley are in the human world. Part of the movie would need to be known, to explain the presence of Waternoose, the teacher character, Roz, and Randall - so it's likely the team had access to a press kit and that prologue scene from the final movie, involving a monster training in a simulation with a robot child. Completely obvious when you think about it.
But remember that there are film clips you unlock as you play the game. These jump around the movie, mostly focusing on the opening. But it gets into the plot beats of the movie, with Boo showing up in the monster world; the chase to put that thing back where it came from, or so help me; and... oh yes, Waternoose's reveal as the twist villain. Immediately contrasted by Waternoose being a non-ironic support character throughout the game, congratulating and rewarding you for your hard work.
I have a conspiracy theory about Scream Team that goes like this. Behaviour developed their game, based on the teaser and what limited press kit they had access to. They developed a scenario that made sense: a prequel to the movie, where Waternoose guides Mike and Sulley into becoming top scarers. They got this on lock, leaving space for movie clips when Pixar finally had it developed far enough along to share with them. They finally got access to the movie, watched it, and went, "Oh no. Oh no." In a huff, they decided to sequence in the film clips in the most vitriolic way they could. They front-loaded it with clips from early in the movie. When they ran out of material, they sequenced out-of-context bits from the tail end of the movie, culminating in the very end of the climax. They deliberately chose NOT to show a scene wrapping up the movie out of spite.
Yeah, maybe that's a little far-fetched. But how else do you explain the game's 100% completion reward? There's a cutscene award ceremony featuring Waternoose giving Mike and Sulley their Gold Medals. Then we get the movie scene where Waternoose gets caught and arrested, ending with him telling Sulley that he's just doomed Monstropolis. Then there's a hard cut to the game's credits, and the game's over.
Like I said - this is why I love to analyze this stuff. Not a great game, but fun to think about.
Like, so, this game. Pretty basic 3D platformer. Three worlds, four levels per world, three medals per level, each medal requires spooping robot childrens or collecting coins. Some racing stages to break things up. Movie clips as a reward. Simple-simple, no great levels but some fun enough biomes and the occasional annoying-as-hell gimmick (that one dumb Nerve in "The Oasis" suuuuuuuuucks). GREAT animation - easily the highlight of the whole thing - and some decent vocal impersonators. I swear Mike Wazowski's "Not bad for a guy with ONE EYE!!!!" is a line I always forget wasn't delivered by Billy Crystal. Weirdly Mike Wazowski is way more fun to control due to getting a bounce, a roll, and a hover on top of Sulley's moveset. Otherwise pretty disposable title.
...this would be all I'd have to say if I wasn't curious about this game. But I am. Part of that's because I got the game new (for PC), and I've been thinking about the game for over 20 years. Part of that's how much I loved Monster's Inc., easily a runaway early favorite Pixar movie for me. But there are things that you think about, as a consequence of all that.
The premise, to begin with. The setup is decidedly not a direct adaptation, instead showing Sulley and Mike Wazowski training to become Scarers as a pseudo-prequel. Fine enough; contradicted by Monsters University, of course, but that was years later. However! If you've seen the movie, you'll remember that Mike Wazowski was not a Scarer, so logically, he shouldn't be out on the field scaring.
Then you start to think about other stuff. Like how the receptionist is the teacher character from the movie's opening rather than the expected Celia. Or how the worlds don't have much of anything to do with the movie's theming (why is there a Waternoose Sphinx???). Or how, in a game where you constantly unlock video clips, the game opens by showing the movie's teaser trailer, released a year before the movie came out...
So we don't get as many of these movie tie-in games any more, but for this era, it was common for these games to be developed in concert with the source material. So goes for all tie-in media, naturally; part of marketing a big release is getting in that multimedia marketing blitz. Part of THAT is coordinating different individuals and teams to work on different cross-media content, which means sharing details ahead of time to people.
In something like a movie with multimedia tie-ins, it comes down to the movie's production team on how and when they inform the other creative teams on what they need to know. This is why we sometimes see discrepancies with tie-in media. My go-to example for this is the novelization for the movie Alien. When Alan Dean Foster was hired to pen the novelization, he was given a working film script, three weeks, and no description of the Xenomorph's appearance. Foster did a great job working with what he was given, but this is why the novelization includes the deleted scene of Dallas being cocooned as well as a reference to the alien's "tentacle". Things Foster couldn't anticipate wouldn't exist in the final product, simply because he did not have access to the same information/creative direction that the film team had.
I mention all this because this appears to be transparently the case with Scream Team/Scare Island. The game came out before the movie, so Behaviour Interactive had to be working with prerelease info. The game's setup doesn't make sense with the tone of the movie, but it is in-line with the teaser trailer, which presents a proof-of-concept scenario where Mike and Sulley are in the human world. Part of the movie would need to be known, to explain the presence of Waternoose, the teacher character, Roz, and Randall - so it's likely the team had access to a press kit and that prologue scene from the final movie, involving a monster training in a simulation with a robot child. Completely obvious when you think about it.
But remember that there are film clips you unlock as you play the game. These jump around the movie, mostly focusing on the opening. But it gets into the plot beats of the movie, with Boo showing up in the monster world; the chase to put that thing back where it came from, or so help me; and... oh yes, Waternoose's reveal as the twist villain. Immediately contrasted by Waternoose being a non-ironic support character throughout the game, congratulating and rewarding you for your hard work.
I have a conspiracy theory about Scream Team that goes like this. Behaviour developed their game, based on the teaser and what limited press kit they had access to. They developed a scenario that made sense: a prequel to the movie, where Waternoose guides Mike and Sulley into becoming top scarers. They got this on lock, leaving space for movie clips when Pixar finally had it developed far enough along to share with them. They finally got access to the movie, watched it, and went, "Oh no. Oh no." In a huff, they decided to sequence in the film clips in the most vitriolic way they could. They front-loaded it with clips from early in the movie. When they ran out of material, they sequenced out-of-context bits from the tail end of the movie, culminating in the very end of the climax. They deliberately chose NOT to show a scene wrapping up the movie out of spite.
Yeah, maybe that's a little far-fetched. But how else do you explain the game's 100% completion reward? There's a cutscene award ceremony featuring Waternoose giving Mike and Sulley their Gold Medals. Then we get the movie scene where Waternoose gets caught and arrested, ending with him telling Sulley that he's just doomed Monstropolis. Then there's a hard cut to the game's credits, and the game's over.
Like I said - this is why I love to analyze this stuff. Not a great game, but fun to think about.