Ariel's Story Studio
| Ariel's Story Studio | |
|---|---|
CD cover art
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| Developer(s) | Media Station Creative Capers Entertainment |
| Publisher(s) | Disney Interactive |
| Series | Disney's Animated Storybook |
| Platform(s) | Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh |
| Release | November 25, 1997 |
| Genre(s) | Point-and-click adventure, interactive storybook |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
Ariel's Story Studio (also known as The Little Mermaid Story Studio) is a point-and-click adventure interactive storybook game developed by Media Station and Creative Capers Entertainment, and published by Disney Interactive. The game was released as a tie-in to the 1997 re-release of the 1989 Disney film The Little Mermaid. The game's plot is an abridged retelling of the film. Despite sharing the same style of gameplay and the same primary developer in Media Station, this game has never been released under the Disney's Animated Storybook name, although it is generally considered to be the eighth entry in that series. As a result, the game is sometimes known as Disney's Animated Storybook: The Little Mermaid.
The vision of Marc Teren, VP of entertainment for Disney Interactive, was to create games with a "true and fair representation of the original property", and aim to capitalise as "ancillary products to successful theatrical and home video releases". To achieve this, Teren helped ensure the games were animated by Disney animators. From December 1994 to February 1995, the company had hired 50 new employees.Children's Business suggests the series came into fruition because in the contemporary entertainment market, it was "customary now for entertainment companies to release CD-ROMs to support a film or TV show".
In 1997, Disney had re-released The Little Mermaid as "counter-programming" to Fox's animated film Anastasia, which was set to be released at the same time. The two studios were "scrambling to mine every potential dollar from their investment and make sure neither outdoes the other", so also butted heads in the video gaming space. Ariel's Story Studio competed against Anastasia: Adventures with Pooka and Bartok. Joseph Adney, Disney Interactive's marketing director, said "What we're trying to do is go way beyond the movie by providing for the child to direct it".
Disney and Media Station collaborated to create more than 12,000 frames of digital animation for each game, as well as 300 music and vocal clips. Digital music and sound effects were composed, orchestrated, arranged, edited, mixed and synchronized at Media Station. The games had hundreds of clickable hotspots that produced animated gags, as well as many mind-challenging interactive games. The voice cast sometimes consisted of actors from the films reprising their roles; meanwhile, at other times voice soundalikes were used. In this game, Jodi Benson and Samuel E. Wright reprise their roles as Ariel and Sebastian respectively. The game was included in The Animated Storybook Collection, along with four other games in the series.
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