Disney's new racing video game at core of big bet

LONDON -- Walt Disney Co. is taking the wraps off an advanced new car racing video game that the entertainment company hopes will bolster its success in the lucrative gaming sector.

As sales of video games prove relatively resilient in the economic downturn, Disney is betting that it can prosper broadly from new games that it makes on its own. Rather than licensing Disney content out to game publishers, Disney's in-house gaming team wants to generate video game characters and story lines that can be the basis of movies as well.

"That is the Holy Grail for video games, to see them successfully become franchises," Graham Hopper, head of Disney's game division, told The Associated Press.

To that end, the company is investing in projects like the latest from its Brighton, England-based Black Rock Studio, a car racing game called Split/Second for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PCs, set within the world of a reality television show.

With a release date of early 2010, the studio behind last year's off-road racing game Pure has employed new graphics-rendering technologies to pit racers against both the track and explosions triggered by competitors. A sneak preview to the AP showed a race track on an airport stage set, complete with an air traffic control tower that can come crashing to the ground.

The title is part of Disney Interactive Studios' strategy of injecting around 20% of its investment dollars into new intellectual property. The company invested about $170 million in overall game development last year and plans to increase that by $40 million to $50 million this year.

The video game market continues to expand even as music and DVD sales slump.

San Diego-based consultancy DFC Intelligence predicts that the worldwide video game market — including consoles, portable machines, their software and PC games — will hit a record of $57 billion this year, up from $33 billion just three years ago.

Nintendo Co.'s success with the Wii, which helped to expand the market beyond "hard core" gamers over the past few years, could play nicely into Disney's reputation for family-focused material. In fact, Disney has had mixed success with a mature-rated game, Turok, a violent shooter game that was distributed under the Touchstone label. Hopper declined to comment on reports that a sequel to Turok had been scrapped, but he said that building a big Touchstone game portfolio was not a priority "right now."