Walt Disney Co. is taking the wraps off an advanced new car racing video game that the entertainment company hopes will bolster its success in the lucrative gaming sector.

As sales of video games prove relatively resilient in the economic downturn, Disney is betting that it can prosper broadly from new games that it makes on its own.

Rather than licensing Disney content out to game publishers, Disney's in-house gaming team wants to generate video game characters and story lines that can be the basis of movies as well.

"That is the Holy Grail for video games, to see them successfully become franchises," says Graham Hopper, head of Disney's game division. To that end, the company is investing in projects like the latest from its Brighton, England-based Black Rock Studio, a car racing game called Split/Second for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PCs, set within the world of a reality television show.

With a release date of early 2010, the studio behind last year's off-road racing game Pure has employed new graphics-rendering technologies to pit racers against the track as well as explosions triggered by competitors.

A sneak preview showed a race track on an airport stage set, complete with an air traffic control tower that can come crashing to the ground.

The title is part of Disney Interactive Studios' strategy of injecting around 20 per cent of its investment dollars into new intellectual property.

The company invested about $170 million in overall game development last year and plans to increase that by $40 million to $50 million this year.

The video game market continues to expand even as music and DVD sales slump.

San Diego-based consultancy DFC Intelligence predicts that the worldwide video game market including consoles, portable machines, their software and PC games will hit a record of $57 billion this year, up from $33 billion just three years ago.

Nintendo Co's success with the Wii, which helped to expand the market beyond "hard core" gamers, could play nicely into Disney's reputation for family-focused material.

In fact, Disney has had mixed success with Turok, a violent shooter game that was distributed under the Touchstone label.

Disney is taking more production in-house, rather than licensing its own characters and content to other developers. It rejected a pitch from its longtime video game partner THQ Inc which made the games based on Disney's Ratatouille and Cars movies to create the game for the upcoming Toy Story 3 film.

The company has a goal of self-publishing 80 per cent to 90 per cent of games, acquiring five development studios in recent years, including Black Rock and Austin, Texas-based Junction Point Studios.

One pillar of Disney's strategy involves new twists in the way the games look.

Split/Second, for example, feels more like a movie with cars surging through dissipating smoke while light refracts through exploding buildings thanks to developments in graphics-rendering technologies such as "deferred lighting."

Video games have traditionally been able to appear as if the action has one or two sources of lighting. Split/Second uses a "deferred renderer" that can generate hundreds of virtual light sources, including ones on exploding particles of buildings.