Todd McFarlane Is Prepared For Titanfall

Of the many product tie-ins McFarlane Toys has been involved with, Titanfall sounds like the ideal product line. It’s a popular and young brand but it’s not so huge that it warrants the attention of the bigger toy companies. Owner and self professed 55-year-old boy, Todd McFarlane sounds excited to work on Respawn’s series. Below you can find an interview with McFarlane as we discussed the challenges of securing contracts with popular franchises and what it’s like to work on a property as it starts to produce sequels.

Gamespot: You weren’t involved in the first Titanfall, correct?

Todd McFarlane: No, I wasn’t. I was a big fan of the company that was making it because I like the second syllable of their name, ‘spawn’.

So who approached who?

I think we were knocking on their door. Looking at Titanfall from a distance, I was thinking, “Wow, I’m a boy and there’s three things that boys like: monsters, dinosaurs, robots. It’s in our DNA.” By the time we approached them, the game had launched and it was a while before the second game was going to come. From a retail standpoint, it’s a little difficult to come in between games because stores aren’t nearly as interested. We knew that a sequel would have a wider variety of mechs. From my selfish, toy-obsessed viewpoint, that’s awesome if I can have different geometry in the mechs and the costumes given all the customizing in the new game. It’s good for my business.

That brings to mind your artistic roots and how you’ve been very at home with being a businessman as well. And you understand the cyclical nature of producing merchandise in between a property’s sequels.

Yeah, sometimes you deal with shy licensors that don’t want to show you everything. But since we already had the deal in place, we could at least dip into the first Titanfall’s designs. The thing I love about the deep customization of Titanfall 2 is that it allows me to come out with unlimited custom paint jobs. Say if I made 30,000 green mechs, I might make 3000 in white, 300 in black, and 30 in purple. Then I’ll threaten to go over to the factory and paint three of them myself or even just paint one and that’ll be the “golden ticket” figure.

On that note, what’s your philosophy on variants?

Don’t force the consumer to buy more figures to determine if there is a variant. I want you to know immediately if you’re looking at a variant, being able to see it with your own eyes. So even when we’re doing signatures with athletes, you can see the signatures. I know it’s frustrating when stockboys take the variants before they end up on the shelves but people still email me saying how happy they are that they can find a Brett Favre figure with a real signature in an Oklahoma Wal-Mart and it was the same $9.99 price as the regular version.

So you’re not a fan of blind boxes, we assume?

No, because it forces you to buy in a way that might stick you with the same three figures and you might never get what you really want. To me there’s no perfect solution. But if you can’t find the variant, we’re still making a lot of the A-version that people should be buying anyway.

Are you a big fan of the convention-exclusive variants?

We don’t do a lot of those anymore. Here’s what the variants do for you, though: because you may have a two year spread in between games, you’re trying to find ways to have the brand still resonate either at retail or in the secondary market. You can potentially get some buzz on the secondary market, like when someone buys a figure for $10 and then sells it for a $500. God bless them. I don’t care. I think that’s part of the fun. It keeps people talking about the product. They’ll then start asking about the next wave from that toy line.

Are you and EA on the same page in sustaining that brand presence?

It’s one of the questions when we go through the door in just trying to create a contract. We ask, “What’s your schedule? How often do you think you’re gonna put out a game? How often will DLC come out?” What’s the biorhythm here? One of the things that was happening when we were doing Halo was that there were big gaps in between releases. We just wanted a bit more content. It wasn’t like Call of Duty where you can count on a new game every year. It’s hard to sustain brand presence when you’re coming out with a game every three years.

Now that you’re involved with Titanfall, are you part of the game’s creative process in any capacity?

No, but I am doing some art for them in a capacity that they’re going to unveil later. It’s more in the form of fun additions. They’ve got lots of talent, but if a Titanfall 3 happens and they want me to design one of the mechs, I’m cool with that.

Was it important for you to depict the mechs with 1 to 1 accuracy or did you exert some creative liberties?

There are two things about that. One is that we wanted to depict the pilots at a decent size so you can see their details. When you see stuff moving really fast in a game, you don’t see yourself stop and study the details. The fun part of having a toy is so you can see those things. We wanted to show off all that cool design that Respawn came up with. But it’s also a game where these pilots jump into these giant mechs, so how do we do that? We’re going to have to scale down the mech so it can fit in a reasonably sized box at a $30 price tag. I’m not a fan of pushing things to $100. We’ll have the 7-inch scale pilot, then we’ll have a 12-inch mech and we’ll throw in a small scaled down pilot. We’re currently trying to find out how to put the pilot into the mech’s chamber without breaking the bank.

Given your experience with other companies’ IPs, was there anything about working on Titanfall that surprised you?

From a selfish point of view from a toymaker, the one thing that we’re looking for is for game companies to keep refreshing things visually. We’re putting these cool plastic goods in a windowed box and it can be tough going back to a single well over and over again like with Master Chief. There weren’t any huge variations when him. When Respawn told us about all the pilot types and all the mechs that would be in Titanfall 2, I said, “That’s it! That’s what we always hope for. Now you’re talking toys.” The more silhouettes, the better. You don’t want people to feel like they’re buying the same things over and over again.

So it’s never intimidating when you end up with a lot of characters to choose from?

No! My best day is when I have too many options. It’s better than picking the top two characters in a series over and over since no one cares about the third and fourth ranked characters. When there’s a wide breadth of visuals, that’s when I can go to the retailers and tell them that I can bring toys from this line to you over the next three or four years before things drain out. I should hope that will work out for Titanfall. By the time we’re out of designs for Titanfall 2, hopefully a Titanfall 3 will be ready.

You must’ve been relieved when Bungie announced that Halo: Reach would feature an ensemble cast.

Oh yeah! I thought, “Wow!”. Before that we were mixing and matching the same figures with the helmet, shoulder, and chest pieces. Many video games do that. I thought Bungie bringing out all those characters was perfect. Video game publishers are starting to get more sophisticated with their licensing programs and they now know how to deal with people like myself that they have to create that variety. It’s easier to sell The Avengers than it is to sell Spider-Man.

You must find a lot of value in these press conferences when you learn about new properties.

Yeah. Sometimes a publisher I have a relationship with will announce something and I’m like, “What!? You didn’t tell us that!”. You do get surprised and now you’re in pursuit mode. Yet sometimes one of the things that works well is to not having product out right at the start of an IP, but having the IP come out, get its footing, grow its fanbase, and then the fanbase begins to ask, ‘How come there aren’t any ancillary products?’ If there were a bunch of toys ready right when the first episode of The Simpsons came out, it wouldn’t have sold because people didn’t really know the show. Sometimes it’s best to let IPs bake themselves into the consciousness of the customer.

That also speaks to trusting your own hunch that a new IP will do well.

The struggle for a small company like mine is that when a new IP blows up, the big boys come in and they drop a bunch of money for the contract and you lose the property. I have to do this delicate dance of trying to find brands that you think are going to last and try to get them just before they start turning the curve so that they’re not so popular that the Fortune 500 guys aren’t going to beat me to the punch.

It’s a blessing and a curse being a mid to small sized company. It’s our greatest value. Whenever a retailer has a question for us, I can give them an answer in less than 24 hours. This is valuable when they announce a last minute addition to an IP. We can usually move a lot faster than a big corporation.