Last Friday Activision Publishing revealed a brand new entry to the Spyro the Dragon series of action adventure titles, coming later this year to most game platforms as well as mobile devices and ‘the web.’

While not much is known about the actual in-game actions and activities we’ll be experiencing in this new title, Activision did reveal an incredibly cool aspect to this new Spyro game that the company is calling “an entertainment breakthrough for the toy and [videogame] industries.”

In Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure, players will make use of specially made action figures depicting different characters from the game, with over 30 characters to choose from. If you want to play as one of these characters, you place the physical, real-world action figure on a physical, electronic glowing stand, or ‘portal,’ and that character then appears in the game for you to control.

If that wasn’t enough, any abilities you learn or statistics you improve while playing the game with that character are saved to memory on the physical action figure. This means that you can take that toy to another person’s game and use your accumulated abilities there, and Activision says you’ll even be able to make use of the same action figures across multiple versions of the same game, including PS3, Wii, Xbox 360 and mobile devices.

In an amazing demonstration video captured by Kotaku’s Stephen Totilo (my favourite of the Kotakuites), with an Activision representative there to showcase the game’s capabilities, you can see exactly how Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventures works in real life:

Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure Demonstration

How cool is that?!

You can also get a better feel for the world of Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure in an official trailer for the game below (featuring AC/DC!):

Skylanders Spyro’s Adventure - Reveal Trailer