Tim Schafer To Bring Sesame Street To Kinect

Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?

No? Well Tim Schafer knows the way.

Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment have proudly announced that the characters of Sesame Street will be coming to your Xbox 360 console later this year for a Kinect-controlled adventure, and that the title Sesame Street: Once Upon A Monster will be developed by Tim Schafer and Double Fine Games.

He may be best known for his off-the-wall characters and avant garde game design, but being a great advocate of creativity and diversity in games, he sees working with Sesame Street – which has been at the front of learning in entertainment for decades – as a perfect fit.

He was quoted to say that “Sesame Street had a profound effect on me, and many members of the Double Fine team, when we were children. So did video games. Now many of us are parents and we want to share with our kids the great experiences we had, but also the completely new ones made possible by cutting-edge technology such as Kinect for Xbox 360. So it’s a labour of love on many levels.”

Playable characters will include well-loved muppets such as Cookie Monster and Elmo, and the game will take the form of a living storybook. As they travel through the game world, players will solve problems, make new “monster” friends and learn key life skills. In the press release for the title, Warner Brothers detail that the game will involve players to dance, jump and even fly – all using the Xbox Kinect camera of course. The game is intended to let children and their parents play and learn together.

So, not what we might have expected as the next project from Double Fine Games, but Tim Schafer has expressed an interest in Kinect-only games that are developed from the ground up to make use of the technology and the creative imagination of the team should meld well with the world of Jim Henson.

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Sesame Street: Once Upon A Monster is due to be released in Autumn 2011 for Xbox 360. Click here for a Tim Schafer retrospective, detailing some of the most important games of his career. Stacking, the latest game from Double Fine Games, was released across Xbox LIVE and the PlayStation Network on Wednesday.