Epic

More than three years ago, I had lunch with my then-co-worker Lilly Rockwell and game developer Warren Spector, who’d just sold his company to Disney. Warren was happy to meet us, but was clearly excited about a project he was completely unable to tell us about. We knew it was something big, but at the time, we had no idea what.

Last summer, the leaks started happening and the world started figuring out that Warren’s project with Disney was Epic Mickey, a bold reinvention of Mickey Mouse (and, it turns out, the rebirth of a long-forgotten animated character named Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, the precursor to Mickey).

Today, a story my editor and I have been talking about for more than a year finally appeared on the front page of the Statesman. Sometimes sitting on a story for that long can suck the wind out of it or put so much pressure on it that you wish it would just go away. That happened once or twice as I was putting it all together, but in the end, I couldn’t be more pleased that we were able to tell Warren’s story (and that I was able to work on it with Brian Gaar, who wrote a separate piece for the business section about the development of the game).

We also ran a photo gallery online and our videographer Jenny Jones shot a great video (below). Stories like this make me feel incredibly lucky to do what I do. Some people here in town regularly do amazing, world-changing things and when I’m fortunate, I get to write about it.

Also running the same day was a story I contributed to the Statesman’s big, annual Season for Caring project. I got to meet an amazing family that really needs help and I hope what I wrote can make a difference because the balancing act they’re pulling off now is frankly stunning. If you can help, please do. They are absolutely deserving of assistance for the love they’re giving to these kids.

Video, by Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon, is here: