Vision. Its a quality I often associate with the late Walt Disney Walt Disney, a man who ceaselessly harnessed his imagination to build timeless experiences. That same kind of vision seems to be the principal driving force in the products created by game developer Harmonix. From its smallest projects (A City Sleeps) to massively influential games like Rock Band, Harmonix always seems to have their creative eye on a clear goal: Marrying music with unique gameplay.

Its fitting, then, that Harmonix was tasked with building a bridge between one of Disneys most ambitious film projects and their own style of interactive entertainment. Theyre certainly adept at handling iconic properties and timeless music. If in doubt of that, go play The Beatles: Rock Band, a game developed with an overwhelming reverence and love for the source material.

Disney Fantasia: Music Evolved, out today, is the result of a new collaboration between Disney and Harmonix that, among other accomplishments, proves that a 74-year-old film is indeed timeless with the right people at the helm.

Yen Sid shows his apprentice how to invoke the Muse in Disney Fantasia: Music Evolved

I recently sat down with Matt Boch, Creative Director ofDisney Fantasia: Music Evolved, to talk about the process of working with Disney, the challenge of making centuries-old music relevant to a new audience, and how his own vision is about much more than developing a video game.

FORBES: Matt, a question thats top of mind concerns the two versions of Disney Fantasia: Music Evolved. Are there gameplay differences between the Xbox One and Xbox 360 versions? Were there technical hurdles involved in developing for Kinect 1.0 and Kinect 2.0?

Matt Boch: Theres only one significant feature difference, and thats the ability to share and upload your remixes to youTube. Beyond that we were able to create feature parity. Of course the Xbox One version is more beautiful both in terms of visuals and audio. [The Xbox 360 version contains a necessary level of both video and audio compression.]

FORBES: How was the process of choosing and licensing songs this time around? Was it similar to the way youve built the Rock Band and Dance Central libraries?

Matt Boch: In a lot of ways it was completely different. In some ways its the same. You find a song you like, its relatively contemporary, you go through the licensing process weve gone through for hundreds upon hundreds of tracks with Rock Band and Dance Central catalogues. But theres a couple key differences here. One is the inclusion of music that exists in the public domain. Were spanning centuries here, not just decades!

We also had to go through the process of recording some of these pieces. Some members of our team went to work with the London Symphony Orchestra and thats not a thing we usually do!

Excerpt from:

A Shared Vision: How Harmonix Is Making Disney's Fantasia And Classical Music Important All Over Again