How Avalanche Snuck A Lightsaber Into The First Disney Infinity

When Disney bought Star Wars in late 2012, Avalanche had already been hard at work on the original Disney Infinity for some time, prepping it for its August 2013 release. It was too late to add a robust Star Wars playset or figures to the game at a worthwhile capacity, but Avalanche felt it couldn’t ignore the acquisition. It’s Star Wars after all.

Prior to the Star Wars acquisition, vice president of production for Disney Infinity, John Vignocchi had friends who worked for Lucas. Once Star Wars became part of the Disney family and they were now co-workers, he started making calls. “We want to do an ultimate unlock in the game. We’d like to put a lightsaber in the game,” Vignocchi told his Lucas friend. “Here’s what we’re thinking: If you own all the figures then this is like this super-secret end of the end – the Yoshi on top of the Princess’ castle.”

The team had to scramble to get it in the game, and they wanted to make sure it was part of the shipped product as opposed to getting added later as an update. “It became a passion project for the team, that was already doing tons of overtime to ship a great game,” Vignocchi says. “They were like, ‘If we can get this approved, we can put in an extra weekend or extra time to get this in there.’”

This is the landspeeder as it appears in Disney Infinity 3.0. It was the ultimate unlockable in Disney Infinity: Marvel Super Heroes.

To get the lightsaber, you had to own all the Disney Infinity 1.0 characters and then you could unlock the fabled Jedi weapon in the Hall of Heroes. The lightsaber pack started with a different, more clever design than what ultimately appears in the game. “The pack initially was shaped like Yoda playing off of the Luke and Yoda thing, and then you pulled the lightsaber out from the backpack, but it eventually became the Rebel alliance logo.” Vignocchi says, “It’s the ultimate unlock in the game. It does the most damage of any weapon in the game.”

It does so much damage in fact, that the team wasn’t sure how to approach the weapon initially. “Back then all the characters just had a three-hit combo when you put something in their hand,” Avalanche general manager John Blackburn tells us. “We didn’t go through and decide what all the damage should be against every enemy and in every playset, so I think we made it do like 10 damage, 10 damage, 1,000. The last hit always blows everything apart.”

For Disney Infinity: Marvel Super Heroes, a similar unlock was made available to obtain Luke Skywalker’s landspeeder. It was all a tease building to Disney Infinity 3.0’s Star Wars-focused playsets and figures, which you can read plenty more about by clicking the banner below.

This feature was originally published on May 29, 2015.