NERF N-Strike: Elite
(Wii) (EA/Hasbro)
Against significant odds, EASL turned around NERF:N-Strike and made a pile of cash for EA and Hasbro. You’re welcome. We had grand ideas for what we could do with this franchise - some really brilliant ideas that Hasbro loved and which would have allowed EASL to have a product line of its own - but the Hasbro biz unit at EA HQ, struggling from some bad decisions elsewhere, wanted to cash in quickly on the opportunity and asked us to turn around a product variant for the following Christmas selling period: something that Toys-R-Us and Wal*Mart could get behind. We obliged. N-Strike: Elite saw us add characters (NERF brand doesn’t have any), an enemy (NERF brand doesn’t have any) and a story (again… brand doesn’t have one). The entire team came together to knock this out of the park, especially Dustin Hansen and Joe Bourrie on design. I am so proud of this team and this game.
Once again it would be on the Wii (a weak platform for EA) and we needed to pack out a NERF blaster with the game like we did the year prior. So we talked to 3rd party company PDP and came up with ‘the Red Reveal’ - essentially the same blaster as the previous year but now it included a red filter that the user could pop-up: when you looked at the game screen through the Red Reveal, you could see things not otherwise visible on the game screen. Genius!
