Funko Fusion At SDCC 2024

At SDCC 2024, we were able to sit in on the Funko Fusion panel and catch-up with some of the panelists later for interviews. Here's everything that we learned about the game at Comic-Con.

Funko Pops have dabbled in the game world with some casual mobile games, but with Funko Fusion the Pops are finally getting the full game that they deserve. The game is being developed by 10:10 Games, a studio formed by Traveler’s Tales veterans – the studio that has given us so many great LEGO games – so the franchise is in good hands. With that kind of background, you can expect some of the same elements in Funko Fusion that made the LEGO games so much fun, but don’t expect Funko Fusion to be a LEGO game with a Funko skin – there’s a lot about this game that will make it a unique action-adventure game in its own right.

If you’ve ever been to San Diego Comic-Con, or just followed the con closely, you’ll know that Funko has a huge presence there. One of the first places con-goers rush to when the show floor opens is the Funko Pop town tucked into the back left corner of the show floor. So what better venue to reveal new details on a Funko Pop game than SDCC? To get more inside information on the game, I dropped in on both the Funko Fusion panel and the press roundtable interviews held afterwards.

The panel included 10:10 Games CEO and creative director, John Burton, the VP of Licensing and Business Development at Funko, Jason Bischoff, Monkeypaw Productions’ Ian Cooper, and the voice of Funtime Freddy, Kelly Goff. After some discussion of 10:10 Games’ DNA, the possibilities of working with over 20 different NBC Universal franchises, some of which have never appeared in games, and the crossover possibilities, the game reveals started coming.

The first was that the game’s hub will be set in a fantasy version of the Funko factory known as the Wonderworks. Imagine what Willy Wonka’s factory would have been like if he made Pops instead of candy and you’ll get a pretty good idea of what to expect. Within the factory sits the Wonderwell, a remarkable technological marvel that acts as a portal to all of the worlds within the game, and the person running everything from within is none other than Freddy Funko himself. The game will finally give Funko fans a chance to learn a bit about the story behind the ubiquitous face of the brand, the Mickey Mouse of Funko.

The game, of course, needs a villain, and the panel revealed some of the thought process behind the creation of that villain. After much discussion of what makes a great villain, the team found themselves gravitating to an antithetical – a Venom to Freddy’s Spider- Man, a Bizarro to his Superman. So, what’s the opposite of Freddy Funko? Eddie Funko.

Eddie is the darkness to Freddy’s light, and wants to take his power so that he can replace the worlds that Freddy has created with dark versions that will make people suffer. While Freddy wants to celebrate creation and bring imagination to life, Eddie is a dark manifestation of that wants to do the opposite, to tear it all down. Eddie is the voice of the world’s haters.

Freddy’s greatest weapon is that he is a shapeshifter, a mimic, and can absorb the likeness and abilities of the monsters and villains that inhabit all of the worlds appearing in the game. And since he is a corrupting force, he’ll even turn some heroes into villains that you’ll have to contend with, like an Eddie-fied Doc Brown from Back to the Future.

If Eddie were to try and take Freddy’s power, how would he do it? What is the source of Freddy’s power? The team looked to a Disney classic for inspiration, Fantasia. In the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Mickey was able to draw on Yensid’s power when he took his master’s hat, so why not make Freddy’s crown a source of power? And so the crown became the ultimate source of power in Funko Fusion’s universe, the way in which all the Funko worlds are manifested, and it’s what Eddie wants to take at any cost.

The panel then revealed that the voice of Freddy would be provided by Clancy Brown. The team has worked with Brown in the past, he provided the voice of Lex Luthor in LEGO Batman among other games. And while on the topic of voice work, you knew there must be a reason that Kelly Goff was on the panel. The team moved from the voice of one Freddy to the voice of another Freddy to reveal details on the Five Night at Freddy’s inspired level in Funko Fusion.

The development team wanted the level to be an homage to the original game, not just a level featuring the characters from Five Nights. So they decided that the level in Funko Fusion should put you in the security room of the pizzeria, looking through cameras, just as if you were playing Five Nights at Freddy’s

So you're in the security room, you're in the pizzeria, and you're looking through the cameras, and you're looking through, you're playing Five Nights at Freddy’s. The team actually worked with Scott Cawthon, Five Night’s creator, to ensure that they stayed true to his original vision. Well, mostly true. The game creates many unique weapons inspired by the franchises it incorporates, an in Freddy’s case we have the pizza oven gun. How fast would you have beaten the original Five Nights game if you could have fired flaming hot pizzas at everyone?

Now the next reveal was probably not too much of a surprise once it was known that Ian Cooper would be on the panel. Yep, Nope will inspire a level in Funko Fusion. The team took being true to Nope as much as they did every other franchise, going as far as doing a full LIDAR scan of the valley surrounding Agua Dulce, California where Nope was filmed. They also recreated an exact in-game replica of the Haywood Ranch.

The panel then moved on to reveal that the physical Funko Pops revealed for the game are merely the first wave. Each of the first wave of Pops, and all subsequent waves tied to the game, will contain DLC cards that will unlock new content in the game. The DLC codes are randomized, though, so you don’t know what you’ll get when you buy a Pop. Wave two will include a Shaun of the Dead Pop, a classic Battlestar Galactica Ceylon, Mecha Freddy, and, of course, Eddie Funko.

Next up was another reveal, and since this was Comic-Con what better way to announce a comic franchise included in the game? And when Robert Kirkman walked out on stage, everyone knew that the next Funko Fusion franchise reveal would be Invincible. And what did Robert Kirkman think of seeing his creation come to life in Funko Fusion?

“I love seeing all the different interpretations of these characters, and it's awesome being able to see all the different liberties being taken, and the different enhancements, and seeing these cool characters in the iconic Funko shape is just really moving for me.”

Now Invincible won’t be featured in the game as an entire world; it will be one of the game’s “cameo” levels. These are secret hidden bonus levels that can be found while exploring the game’s primary worlds. In this particular cameo level your goal will be to save Mark from Omni-Man’s attacks. And once you’ve helped save him, you’ll unlock the Invincible characters for use in other levels.

After the panel concluded, I was able to catch-up to the panelists for some roundtable interviews. Kellon Goff is very friendly and affable in person, and is really enthusiastic about discussing his voice work. When asked about the work he did on Funko Fusion, Goff responded:

“Well, specifically for Funko Fusion, I voiced Freddy Fazbear, the original one, which is the first time I've gotten to give a voice to the big guy, the original one, so I'm very grateful for that. I've also voiced Glamrock Freddy, which is where a lot of the bass in his voice came from. I got that role back in 2019, so I've developed it for five years now.”

If you’re wondering if there will be a lot of dialog for Freddy Fazbear in the game, Goff had this to say about that:

“For this, so it's mostly efforts, if not all, but there are times where you get electrocuted and usually in more realistic games like Last of Us or whatever, they'll have you do a realistic getting shocked, like when you're shocked it goes through your whole body and paralyzes you, but this is a bit more cartoony, so they let me go like that kind of thing. That always gets them, that always gets us laughing.”

“So we have an excel sheet of all the different efforts there are. We go down the list and usually it's just like small hit, whether you're hitting or getting hit. The impact is when you're getting hit, but hit is when you're hitting.”

“So small hit, medium hit, large hit, and then different types of deaths, if you're like falling to your death over a cliff, you're screaming, or if you're just like peacefully passing away, which I don't know how often that happens in video games, but yeah, there's usually a universal language for efforts and stuff.”

“I always try to get the stuff that like TikTok or whatever makes into memes and try my best to translate it and put it in some way non-offensively into the video games and stuff. I can't roll around in the booth, but I can scream and kind of like move from side to side without my mouth coming off the mic, like ah, ah, like that kind of thing. It helps a lot with hitting and getting hit, if you like not actually hit yourself, but like sort of mimic the impact so you can do what you think you would do, like boom, like boom, like that kind of thing. Or like yeah, of course, taking care not to punch the microphone.”

If you’re worried that Goff had to endure that kind of high intensity voice work for weeks, you’ll be relieved to hear that he completed his work for Funko Fusion in about two hours.

Asked if he is a collector of Pops, Goff enthusiastically answered:

“Yeah, yeah, no, I've been collecting Funko's since, wow, I was 13, since I started voice acting. And they've been a huge part of not only society, and the society that I hang around, I'm a big old nerd if you haven't heard of right now, but I just see them at every convention, and it's just the most amazing feeling in the world to deface someone's property, and that's the best day ever to them, especially when they're a little kid, and they're like, ah, it's the best. So I thank Funko for that feeling, because that's what a lot, if not most of people, come up to me to get signed.”

“And seeing it expand into entertainment mediums like this is exciting too, because that means it's evolving as a brand toward a whole new, it's not just emulating the popular things, it's going to become a popular thing, I think, on its own too, in terms of a video game for now. I would love to see it do a show or a movie one day, that would be so sweet, now that I think about it, this is all just coming to me right now.”

Next, we were joined by Arthur Parsons and John Burton of 10:10 Games, John Mildred from Universal, and Jason Bischoff from Funko. I kicked things off with a question that I was eager to have answered – will players be able to Pop themselves in the game? Bischoff responded:

“Oh, interesting question. OK, so admittedly, when we started developing the development of the game about three years ago, Pop Yourself was not even a dream in the eyes of Funko yet. It was something that we had talked about but hadn't really created.”

“We launched Pop Yourself in earnest last fall, if I'm not mistaken. So it is not a core function in the game today. But it is definitely something we're keeping an eye on. It's like a character builder type opportunity, but not presently in Funko Fusion.”

When asked about bringing all of the crossovers into the game, Mildred said:

“It's super easy to take over 20 worlds of characters, bring them in front of the studio, and say like, hey, we want to honor all of these things and totally break all the rules. That's a hard process, admittedly, right?”

“It would not have been possible if not for Arthur and John and the whole 10:10 Games team. They have a pedigree of titles that they've released historically. Walking in the door with that history, the sales data, the substantiates, all that, it makes it a different conversation. Because fundamentally, it's about trust, right? Can these people do the things that they say that they're going to be able to do? And ultimately, do they care enough, or do they love the IPs enough to treat them like they were their own? And I think you're seeing it in the product today. Just as an outsider looking in, it's so lovely to see things like the Back to the Future level come together in such a faithful way, but on the same token, totally Funko-ed out, right?”

Parsons then chimed in:

“It's not a difficult process, and I know that sounds almost blasé. It's a fun process. And I think to what Jason said, the fact that we have, as a development studio, previously worked with, again, some of the world's biggest and best IP, it's being trusted. That's the main thing. We can literally walk through and go, look, we've made really authentic experiences.”

“Guess what? They're really fun and really funny, because that's what we do. We operate in the world of whimsy and pushing the boundary right to the very edge. But because we've done it, people trust us.

And I think then to be gifted such a great abundance of movies and TV shows, that's where it's then, I think, the difficulty is keeping a lid on what we want to do, because that's where things can really just keep expanding.”

“But we want to make sure that everything we do is faithful. So yeah, if we're, which we are, we're showing the Hot Fuzz worlds of The Shaun of the Dead or Scott Pilgrim or Umbrella Academy, they're faithful. Fans of those IP are going to absolutely love them.”

“But you've got the fun confusion twist of the storyline that's running through, the Easter eggs that are hidden everywhere, the little nods that people won't even get unless they're hardcore fans of these things, because they're so ingrained in the franchises.”

Burton joined in next:

“I would add quickly on that, too, is you don't have to be a fan of all 20-plus worlds or characters. The game can absolutely be a first-chance encounter to discover these places. And then, ultimately, go back to the source material, right?”

“Admittedly, before working on this title, sorry, John, I had not seen The Thing. But I think many people will have that experience, right? Which is, maybe they haven't watched Umbrella Academy. And my sincere hope is that they do, right? Because more fans is more fans. It's a big win for everybody. It's a platform for discovery, for as much as it is honorific of everybody that's already been all in on some of these franchises, right? There's something for everyone. It's a platform, but it's also ridden with Easter eggs so that you feel like you're really seen and heard.”

“And from a game design perspective, our hypothesis, the boring bit right at the very start was we believed there were no games in the market that celebrated fandoms and allowed people to celebrate fandoms together, right? That's the big thing here is you can go and play a game and you can play with other people, but you've all got to like the same thing.”

“Nobody likes the same thing.”

“So all around this table, we have fans of stuff. We're geeks. We're nerds. We love different things. And we can all sit here and go, yeah, we can probably agree that Succession's an amazing TV show. But then at the same time, you'll be like, Jason loves Turtles and Power Rangers. I love Fraggle Rock and He-Man. And you can go around the room. We'll love different things. So that's where we came as a developer. Like, how do we bring people together that, as well as that, have this broad spectrum of like, pop collectors are generally 13 to 45, core. And then they go outside of it. And it's so wide.”

“But then you go through it and go, right, well, you've got 70s are covered with Jaws back, you know, about Battlestar Galactica, 80s, Back to the Future. And you just work through and you go, right, tick a box, tick a box, tick a box for this different demographics. And then you go with the personal favorites. “

“And Universal are pretty much the only people that have that wealth. They've got the blockbusters that are current right now, you know, the Jurassic worlds, yeah, the Megans, the Umbrella Academy, yeah, new seasons in what, like, under two weeks. But then they've got so much cool stuff in the vault, the Xenas, the Knight Riders. Like, Xena, she's never been in a game. Hot Fuzz and Shaun have definitely haven't. Battlestar Galactica, apparently. Maybe something back on the Amiga or something.”

“But what Funko allows us to do is really bring this stuff together. Like, you couldn't do this anywhere else. This range of, I'm only looking down there, just the key art, but you couldn't bring that many IP together that work together, that are authentic to their own stories, but also to, like, the overarching story. Funko lends a lot of stuff.”

“He Man in a video game. Like, eight-year-old me would be so happy right now. Every Saturday morning, I used to sit there and watch him. Eight-year-old me would be so happy if I could whisper it, like, one day, one day you will be able to be, like, adding to canon, which is what we've done. We've added to canon as well in Invincible.”

Given the team’s background in working on so many LEGO titles, I asked them if the game progression would be similar to a Lego game, in which a level opens and you play through the primary characters and then it opens up for later characters, or can you mash things up right off the bat?

“So, we've made a game that we believe is for, like, for now, here and now. So we've looked at this and gone, right, what do people want? They want their own unique experience. They want that player agency. They want to, like, straight off the bat, they want to be able to pick their favorite thing.”

“So you can actually, when you first load the game up, you get given a choice. Do you want to play as a Scott Pilgrim character, a He-Man character, Jurassic World character? Like, you pick your favorite franchise and then you're off on your journey.”

“You get introduced to the game in the Wonderworks, which is obviously Freddy's Toy Factory, and you get introduced to Eddie straight off the bat, and it's like, oh, wow, so this game's, like, there's something brutal really early, which, like, shocked me when I remember reading that script.”

“And it's like, okay, we're going there. And it's like, okay, cool, I'm cool with that. And then you go off on your journey. So it's definitely different.”

“But you do get an authentic experience of something, say, like Jurassic World. You know, you'll be going as Owen and Kayla and Barry. But then, once you've done that, yeah, fill your boots. Like, you can mash up however you want. You could be going in as, I'm just trying to think, you could be playing as a part of, like, what, Skeletor? Like, Freddy Fazbear? Invincible? Yeah, Invincible, and then, like, Michonne from The Walking Dead, if you pre-ordered it, to get the pack. But, like, that's the joy. And I think to be able to watch people play and see the crazy mashups they do, but also find the hidden stuff that we put in the game when you do certain mashups, like, that's the joy of a mashup video game. There's the authentic bit that we've talked about, but then there's the joy of people's brains when they go, oh my God, what would happen if? And it's like, well, we're doing it. We're letting you live those fantasies.”