Development
Scribblenauts was first conceived in the second quarter of 2007, near the same time that they had envisioned Lock's Quest. Creative Director for 5th Cell, Jeremiah Slaczka, stated that they were seeking counterparts of Nintendogs and Brain Age, games that had attracted a much wider demographic than most other niche games, that 5th Cell could develop. The concept of Scribblenauts came from a combination of a previous idea he had for the DS that was similar to Mad Libs and a dream of his. An example given for the Mad Libs was that players could write a Mad Lib of a "dog walking through a forest", and a dog would appear in a forest and walk through it. However, he realized the game would be tedious and that players would only be interested in using keywords. The dream was of being inside an Aztec temple and having to solve puzzles; one in particular involves three paintings, with the objective being straightening them and then moving on to the next room through a portal. While he thought it was a cool idea for a game, he also felt that it lacked both a hook and replayability. He debated whether this would work best on the Wii or the DS, but later decided to combine the writing element with a puzzle element to fix the lack of replayability. Slaczka realized that the concept of the game may have been considered impossible by other programmers, but found that 5th Cell's Technical Director Marius Fahlbusch felt confident they could create the required elements.
During development, Slaczka and the team tried to figure out what the DS was all about, trying to make Scribblenauts appeal to everyone. As Lock's Quest was thought of first, they focused on releasing that game first while beginning the development of Scribblenauts. The game entered beta around May 2009, and had numerous play-testers exploring the game. About half of 5th Cell's staff worked on the game. It was developed alongside the DS version of Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter.
Scribblenauts was originally developed without having a publisher for the game. Slaczka noted that unlike other games where the developers could complete and polish a single level to garner interest while work on the rest of the game continued, Scribblenauts needed to show support for its large dictionary from the start, making it difficult to promote the game. The company was in negotiations with a publisher in the early part of 2009, letting that publisher decide when it would be best to announce the game. Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment officially announced itself as the publisher for Scribblenauts in May 2009. Slaczka noted that of the other publishers they talked to, they felt Warner Bros. was the best one, particularly due to their proximity to 5th Cell and their interest in the title.
Scribblenauts was originally titled "Wordplay", but the team felt that this was "generic". The title Scribblenauts began as a temporary name to replace it that would work better for pitching the game, but as development proceeded, the team couldn't think of a better one, so the name stuck and became the final title of the product.
Konami published the game in Japan on January 27, 2011, which features Konami characters such as Old Snake, Manaka Takane and the Vic Viper.
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