Electric Shadow

Valiant Goes 8-Bit with Harbinger Wars

CBR has a great interview with the Valiant guys about their upcoming 8-Bit-style iOS and Android game adaptation of their first big crossover event since re-launching their line, Harbinger Wars:

CBR News: A retro, 8-bit mobile game isn't unheard of, but it's certainly unusual when it comes to comic book-based video games in this era. How exactly did this project begin and where did the idea to deal exclusively in 8-bit come from?

Dinesh Shamdasani: We announced a series of 8-bit covers for our June books, and they got a tremendous response. What happened is we were all sitting around -- we do brainstorming meetings, and we were coming up with creative ideas, marketing ideas, sales ideas -- and Warren Simons had recently seen "Wreck-It Ralph." We were all talking about the proliferation of 8-bit style and how genius that movie was and how much fun it is. He pitched doing Valiant characters in 8-bit. Atom Freeman, our sales manager, knew Matthew White, who did the covers for us. He hooked us up with Matthew, who did a test piece that actually ended up being the "Planet Death" "X-O Manowar" cover. That hasn't changed from the test piece he did with no direction. It was fun, it was cool, we really liked it and we started talking about how we wanted to play that game. I had a chat with Russ and said, "Man, it would be so cool [to play that game]." Russ said he knew the perfect person for that. Russ and Steve Newton knew each other from doing Marvel with DSI. We sat down with the Storm City guys and everybody was on the same page and the 8-bit covers were announced. … We were totally gung-ho about doing the game and that's how we hooked up with Steve Newton and Storm City, and Steve brought in Dan Kitchen, who's been tremendous.

I interviewed Valiant CEO (then CCO) Dinesh Shamdasani on Giant Size back in the show's earliest days.