Last year's release of Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure was a surprise hit for Activision. The video game and toy combination was both innovative and fun to play, not to mention a bit addictive. Unlike Nintendo's Pokémon franchise, "collecting them all" in Skylanders meant tracking down the toys in real life in order to use them within the game. With the sequel, Skylanders: Giants, just around the corner, we decided to join other media and Activision reps on a trip to the northern California office of Toys for Bob, the developer behind the Skylanders games, to see the magic behind the plastic.
Toys for Bob is housed in an old hangar that was converted to an office. Once inside the building, everything is decked out retro tiki-island style. There are faux thatched roofs, leis, a surf board with a Skylanders poster attached and actual tiki statues to set the island feel. If you have a hankering for gum, there's a big '70s style spaceship filled with gumballs.
It's the kind of environment that caters to open-ended creativity, which even spilled over to the bathrooms. The converted hangar has urinals in all the bathrooms. Since the women had no use for the urinals, they turned them into glorified plant holders and plastered the walls with male pin-up photos — just like a teenage girl's bedroom. You can tell they have fun here.
After a quick look around, we were escorted to seats facing a projector screen where Paul Reiche, the Toys for Bob studio head, gave us an overview of the company's history and how it came to develop Skylanders. The presentation then shifted to Giants and the lore behind the new characters.
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