Game testers certainly have their role to play in the development and perfecting of a new game. They’re assigned to play the same game for hours, day after day, looking for glitches, trying every possible approach to game-play, discovering hidden goodies and noting every successful and failed strategy. Their detailed reports and feedback do have a significant impact of the final stages of a game’s development. So, their input might result in major changes to a yet-to-be-released game. For example, thanks to game tester feedback for the upcoming game, Epic Mickey, Junction Point, the creators of the game removed the option of making Mickey evil.

One of the central characteristics of the new Disney game is giving gamers the opportunity to develop Mickey Mouse into a friendly or fiendish-hearted character based on the type of actions they commit during the game. Of course, if you choose to be good and noble, Mickey will be the recognizable do-gooder we’re all familiar with. However, committing evil actions will change Disney’s most legendary character into a much darker, despicable version of himself that’s likely to scare children.

So naturally, game testers spoke out against the “evil” option after sampling the game, prompting Junction Point to remove the feature entirely. Since then, they’ve replaced the evil Mickey version with a much tamer, “smudgy look” Mickey who simply resembles a dirty vagabond instead of a good mouse gone very bad. Personally, I think Junction Point would have been wiser to keep evil Mickey in Epic Mickey to make the game more interesting for older, mature players. With this change, they shouldn’t be surprised if only the most loyal and most hardcore Mickey fans bother to pick up this title, their number likely being a smaller percentage of the world’s gaming population.

Source