For gamers and would-be Dr. Frankensteins alike, 2008 may be a banner holiday season—that is, if Jamie Ottilie gets his wish. The veteran game designer, president and COO of Abandon Interactive Entertainment has been laboring with his creative team for three years to bring to market Freaky Creatures, a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game with a distinctive collectible toy component that allows players to build their own customized monsters.

“The team behind Freaky Creatures has been working together for 12 years,” Ottilie tells Playthings. “The original idea came from our creative director, Matt Saia. When he was young he played a Commodore 64 game called Mail Order Monsters, and he wanted to bring the experience of building your own monster to life to a new generation.”

The game experience begins at the retail level with a starter pack of two figures and a flash drive that brings them to life online. After players have customized their creatures, they can battle them against others via PC-to-PC, PC-to-mobile, or mobile-to-mobile game play. Initially, each creature comes with 50 different virtual parts, 20 powers and four objects for its lair. There will be about 3.2 billion unique visual permutations of creatures available when the game launches this fall, according to Ottilie.

“We wanted to bring the product to market in a unique way, at an aggressive price point for an online game,” he says. As long-time toy company collaborators (having worked on gaming for Mattel's Hot Wheels, Tyco RC and Matchbox brands as well as Hasbro's Tonka), “we are well versed in toy-to-game products,” Ottilie says. “We had spent years turning toys into video games and we thought it would be great to go the other way and turn our video game into a toy and to integrate the two products.” And though “everything we do as a company starts with the game,” Ottilie notes, the line of collectible figures has also been painstakingly planned and developed.

“We're all in our 30's and we love well-made, high-quality figures. We are all McFarlane toy fans,” Ottilie says. “Our figures are truly collectable quality figures, most with over 100 paint operations each, and all done with hand-painting techniques that required our toy designer to spend weeks at the factory.”

The figures are key to expanding the venture's appeal to multiple age ranges, Ottilie says. “We tried to make a title that was accessible to all ages. Focus testing shows we have a sweet spot with 8- to 11-year-olds [but] we do see older kids and adults buying the figures.”

There will be two starter packs of two characters each plus six single-character packs in the initial assortment; of these 10 characters, two will be short-packed, Ottilie says. The company plans to release a new set of 10 figures each year, with an incentive built in for a bonus, virtual-only 11th character available to customers that have purchased all 10 in a set. “In addition, we are working on what we call a 'live content model' which means that we will add to the site and the game each and every month. This will include new parts and powers for your creatures, new items to use in the lair, and new gameplay, lair or social features,” Ottilie says.

The figures will be distributed through independent retailers, catalogs and at a couple of nationwide chains that stock video games, Ottilie says. The products will be supported at these retail locations with a line of promotional comic books, which provides the company with “a way to tell the story behind the universe, creatures and characters,” Ottilie says.

Going forward, Ottilie hopes to expand Freaky Creatures to other product categories, such as apparel, playsets, trading card games and other toys. He adds, “The main concern for us in maintaining integrity and quality in the brand and being able to include codes for in-game content with anything that we do.”