Meet one of video games' most interesting new companies… wait, Disney's former CEO said what?
All about Delphi Interactive, an out-of-nowhere company that orchestrated this year's big James Bond and FIFA games. And about Delphi backer Michael Eisner, who recently stole the show.
New York City — I’m at the Paley Center for Media in midtown Manhattan, several flights up on a sweltering day. I’m wearing a blue suit that I’d tracked down the day before, after accidentally leaving it at the dry cleaners for two years (that’s a long story).
I’m eating some free lunch, ready to listen to a talk about an intriguing new video game company.
It’s about an hour before I’ll ask the former CEO of Disney about green-lighting Kingdom Hearts.
I’m here with low expectations for Michael Eisner, the head of Disney from the mid 1980s to 2005, because I’m a gaming reporter, and Eisner, to the best of my knowledge, doesn’t figure much into gaming history. There’s just this one anecdote I found from the early 2000s about a Disney executive who had to get Eisner’s approval during a trip to Tokyo for Square to keep making its not-quite-authorized mash-up of Final Fantasy characters with Mickey, Donald and Goofy.
I’ve arrived at Paley with higher expectations for Casper Daugaard, whose video game company Delphi Interactive has come out of nowhere this year to suddenly be a major force in the industry. They’re the talent matchmakers behind a critically acclaimed new James Bond game 007 First Light, and they’re the reason there’s a splashy if simplified FIFA World Cup game available on Netflix via a streaming connection.
What’s Delphi’s deal? Where did they come from?
Conveniently, that’s a big part of the panel that Daugaard is on at Paley. He’s up there with Eisner, who is a Delphi investor, taking questions from Moritz Baier-Lentz, an Open AI advisor who is also a Delphi investor.
To avoid over-hyping I will briefly skip past the conclusion of the panel to the moment Eisner steps down from the dais and I approach him, identifying myself as a reporter. I ask him if he can recall saying okay to a game called Kingdom Hearts.
No, he replies.
You were pitched the game in Tokyo, I tell him. It was Final Fantasy plus Disney characters.
Oh, I remember now, he says.
Do you recall why you said yes?
I don’t, he tells me.
Later, I realize I should have shown him some character art. Maybe Sora with a keyblade. Perhaps I could have jogged his memory. What a mistake.
But let’s rewind to the beginning of the mid-day panel, to Daugaard talking about Delphi’s origins, about contacting the James Bond rightsholders over five years agoafter a decade-plus drought of any big new Bond games.
“It turned out that the owners had sort of soured on the partnerships they had with big corporations like Electronic Arts and Activision and some of the games they had made,” he explains to an audience dining on fancy lunch, dressed in suits and dresses. (The invitation called for business attire, hence my blue suit).
Daugaard, who hadn’t previously worked in gaming, has a good story. He says he tried to intern for IO when he was a teen, but they said he was too young. He made some tech start-ups, says Delphi came into existence to get a Bond game made.
Some Delplhi skeptics I’ve spoken to figure the new company as a bunch of middlemen. I’m not sure Daugaard would entirely disagree. He explains on stage and later to me during a sitdown interview that Delphi’s purpose is to work outside of the traditional game studio system, to match elite game development talent with popular intellectual property.
It’s interesting. Delphi’s FIFA stuff is interesting, too, as Daugaard tells the audience about reading in The New York Times a few years ago that FIFA and longtime gaming partner Electronic Arts were breaking up. He describes how he audaciously emailed FIFA to see if, on the strength of Delphi already getting Bond, perhaps they’d like to make a deal, too.
But I have underestimated Eisner.
Dauguard is on stage talking about some of the principles of the FIFA game, one of which is to make it pretty easy. Just let people have fun.
And here’s Eisner, sitting next to him, with a killer Disney anecdote that is partially related:
“We learned…at Walt Disney World: make our golf courses easy. People come down there for a week. Fathers are not that interested in It’s A Small World. Playing golf, they want to think they did well. So we’re always saying the opposite of what most courses say. You know what? We don’t need quite as many sand traps, right? So the idea of making something easier resonates with me.”
I take mental notes about all the interesting things I’m hearing about Delphi during this panel that I will share with readers.
But, wow, here’s Eisner getting awfully blunt about Disney’s bungling of the video game business in the 1980s:
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