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Xevoz-liscious!
July 15th, 2010
Its time to come clean with a basic fact about the Dynamo team. We miss Xevoz. Circa 2002, Ben Hitmar and I began working with the Stikfas team in Singapore. What an amazing group of people. It was a collaboration that had a huge impact on me, both professionally and personally. Not long after Tuck came on board and the future Xevoz team was set. At that point, I was a Senior Director of R&D at Hasbro, 9 years into an amazing career. Having worked on everything from Star Wars to Batman to Pokemon, admittedly the ‘mass-market’ way of doing things had steadily crept into my psyche. Nothing bad about it, but mass leads to certain solutions and alternative leads to another set of solutions, primarily because of scale. Working on Stikfas was a treat, but when we started to create Xevoz (originally called Evo), it was like eating pie for every meal. The original goal was just to be an ‘aged-down’ version of Stikfas. True to its name, it evolved and became something much more, especially to those of us who worked on it. It allowed us to back away from the rigidity of a traditional property. The characters didn’t have a permanent personality or origin or even a name. They had a ‘job’ and a known place in the zeitgeist, but YOU got to decide what they were really all about. A conversation during a typical day went something like… Wayne- Okay, we need a new elemental guy. Tuck (or most times Ben)- What about magma? W- That’s cool, we can do some crusty rock texture painted on top of a nice tinted clear. T- What’s his job? W- Tough one… What about something Hawaiian to go with the volcano theme? Surfer? T- Yeah, he can surf the lava flows as they come down the side of the volcano. Maybe he’s like a sacred, carved rock at the very tip of the mountain and as the volcano erupts he comes to life. W- Sweet. He needs some rocky looking Jam’s shorts and maybe a lei for his funny part. T- Sounds good to me! This is abbreviated, but every Xevoz conversation went something like that. The sky was the limit and our imaginations soared with the opportunity. Every day was amazing, but the best days were when we got a box of ‘first shots’ (pilot parts that are the right shapes, but not really tuned-in to fit or function properly) from the factory. You’d have an entire wave of figure parts sitting in front of you. No paint, just raw potential like a bag of Lego’s with no directions. We’d sit for hours trying parts within each kit first and then trying parts across kits to see what fun we could create. Anyone who has ever sat with a pile of Xevoz parts can attest to the amazing flow state that you enter, propelled by the realization of one small epiphany after another. Giddy comes to mind. It was in these hands-on sessions that the personality, openness and opportunity of Xevoz started to take shape. A DIY philosophy, born in Stikfas, that fully took hold and developed a life of its own. From the start of the second wave, we talked as much about how new parts could expand upon the total part library. The novel functionality of the parts became a more significant part of defining the play value of each kit. After a while, anyone who wasn’t involved in the day-to-day discussion, lost the reference point for why we were doing some of the things we did. We were in a zone and a bit off the traditional map. It wasn’t all fun and games. Well, in truth, they were two different things. On one side was the fun and the other side was developing the game. Its easy to be hard on the game, but it was a different kind of fun. We had some great game designers, Jim and Bill, to help us design the mechanic. It was a really fun game. Applied to a different product, it might still be selling like hotcakes. The only issue is that Xevoz the toy didn’t need it. Why the game was added is lost to history. Games were very fashionable at the time. I was also working on Beyblade and Pokemon, so I don’t recall fighting the idea much. Hell, I may have suggested it. It was a decision that leeched a lot of our time, messing with part names and stats, creating and checking labels, and rereading instruction sheets over-and-over. We produced some beautiful game boards. In my mind, none of it could compete with the thrill of the build system and the open-source nature of the IP. What set Xevoz apart, and what people still don’t understand is that it was built on ‘guidelines’ and suggestions, not rules. Who were we to name the characters or tell the stories? That was for the users to do. The characters were all from different, but familiar regions and were members of races that were easy to understand. You almost didn’t have to tell the story, because you already knew it. That ‘open-sourceness’ was completely counter intuitive to everything I had learned (and was radically unlearning) from licensed brands . All the best things I know to be true about toys, culture and creativity, I learned while I was on Xevoz. Mostly, I was reminded of the stark differences between action figures, characters, and toys. In the figure biz, I think we’ve forgotten that they aren’t all the same thing. But then again, most times you’ve got a huge property to bring those characters to life. In a world full of other people’s stories, where can we find a simple medium to express those characters and stories that come to life in our own minds? I’ve got a little stash. Best of luck in finding your own. Here’s a smattering of Xevoz goodness. Viva La Xevoz! 59 CommentsLeave a Reply |
I loved these things when they first came out, and had I known that they wouldn’t last very long I surely would have collected more, anyway I have a question. My question is, will they ever release these in retail stores again? I don’t have quite enough money for buying kits online, and I’d love to see them again.
I hope someday this will come back the xevoz line is probably the best toyline ever.
It’s nice to know that a spider kit had a good chance.
You mentioned that the Sectoids didn’t sell as well as other races. What factors determined the amount of figures produced for each race? By wave 4, there was a very uneven amount of figures from the original six races. Was it just that races like the Neo Sapiens and Unnatural sold better than Hyperfuries and Sectoids, or was it that you and the other designers had more, or stronger, ideas for certain races?
When we built a wave, we tried to support it with a certain amount of species that we knew would sell more- which is why we ran a bit short on sectoids. The humans were harder to create archetypes for, but more kids seemed interested in them than the other species. I think the waves would have gotten more diverse as time moved on and we proved that robots, bugs and monsters had as much, if not more interest from kids.
So much of what we did was theoretical, which is why it felt so fresh. There we no pre-existing patterns from any other line. Most people don’t see the connection, but Xevoz was much closer to Masters of the Universe than any other toy line in history. We were just about creating your own cool and crazy characters.
By “robots, bugs and monsters”, I’m guessing you mean the more sinister races.
What decision process did a figure’s design go through before it was finished? Once the core theme of a character was chosen, a vampire for example, how was the look and feel of that character decided upon – such as the decision to make the vampire a twisted, inhuman creature to the more humanoid and caped look of Dracula? How many perliminary sketches or whatnot were done to nail the desired feel of the figure, or to find certain details such as the battle damaged ear on the Blood Fang head, the recurring ‘V’ shapes throughout the figure, or the articulated talons and ponytail?
Also, how was the amount or size of the figure’s parts determined, wether it would have some reused parts or all new parts, and the type of kit the figure would be in(Basic, Deluxe, Two-pack, etc.)? I know these are a lot of questions but I’m really interested.
There’s a new Xevoz dedicated website where the owner swears he’s in negotiations with Hasbro to bring back the toy line. He’s told me he’s been in contact with the original designers to have a hand in bringing back.
If you don’t mind me asking, where can we find the website? I’d like to check it out.
what was your favorite figure?
did you have a favorite combination of stock pieces made into a new figure (what fans call a “kitbash”)?
I have a lot of favorites. You tend to love all your ‘kids’ for different reasons. Our last wave that never hit the shelf had the Mechshell- the steampunk inventor turtle and the Scarabushi- Sectoid Samurai/storm trooper.
Frankenpunker and Rockahuna are high on my list. We were working on a centaur at the very end that would have been amazing. I think most of my favorite parts are either hyper fury or unnatural parts. I like creepy and energy colors and textures mixed together. I’ve been playing around with some Xevoz compatible parts for a side project called ModiBot. designing them myself (although I’m no wiz at Rhino) and having them printed at Shapeways. You can see a bit of my process at ModiBot.com. Although its not quite the xevoz build system I built a version that holds xevoz parts. Keep thinking I’ll do more but haven’t had a chance to get back on board since new years or so.
Thx for the interest. Always fun to talk some xevoz.