New LBP Interview on IGN!
This is not the same as the one that was released December 19th. Enjoy:
http://ps3.ign.com/articles/940/940711p1.html
UK, December 24, 2008 - Guildford, the historical Surrey town located just southwest of London, can rightly call itself the UK capital of videogames. Dominating the town centre is EA's newly built towers, a colossal structure that spearheads the company's European operations and features its own gift shop. Then there's Lionhead, its studio set in the more leafy outskirts of the town and from where Peter Molyneux lays out his own blueprint for the future of gaming.
Nearer the town's train station, there's a much smaller office, but one that can match either for the impact it's had this year. Formed by a number of ex-Lionhead employees, Media Molecule works its magic above a bathroom shop in an industrial park. The reception is illuminated by a string of fairy lights spelling out 'hello', an aging and magisterial large oak table where the team meet taking up much of the space. It's from here that LittleBigPlanet, the definitive PlayStation 3 game of the year, was masterminded by a small team of less than thirty.
Three of the team take a break from adding the final touches to the Metal Gear Solid pack to talk us through the year past and what the future holds for the game; Alex Evans, energetic despite having just returned from a triumphant visit to the US for the Spike Video Games Awards where Media Molecule was crowned Best Studio; David Smith, one of the founder members who also talks a mile a minute and confesses to us he finds some of the adulation for LittleBigPlanet a little scary; and Kareem Attourney, who even in a team as fresh thinking as Media Molecule comes across as strikingly leftfield in his approach to gaming.
IGN: It's been a pretty big year for Media Molecule. How are you feeling at the end of it all?
Kareem Ettouney: It's a huge challenge to create an idea like LittleBigPlanet because it's a game that never ends. Unlike other games where you finish and you're back to square one and brainstorming again, we wanted to build a platform and a universe that we keep feeding and supporting, so in terms of time and life it's very challenging.
Alex Evans: The amazing thing is that when we first pitched to Phil Harrison three years ago, one of the lines he came up with which I've been using ever since is that the Blu-ray release is day one of the project rather than the last day, so what was once your end is now your beginning. I knew it and I said it a thousand times, but now I really know it. It really is beginning now, and we're watching the levels coming back. What freaks me out most of all is that the latest Wire magazine, the one with Ray Ozzie on the cover, there's an entire column which sounds exactly like our conversation with Phil Harrison. The article's basically laying out his plan for Microsoft, to the extent that there's a quote that says Ray Ozzie's vision for Microsoft is "when the gold disc is done, that's the beginning" etc, and it's exactly the quote that we see as our vision for LittleBigPlanet. I was reading this article, and you could have substituted LittleBigPlanet for all of Microsoft. It sounds incredibly arrogant, but I was laughing out loud. It could have been pulled from one of our meetings, and apparently that's the vision for Microsoft. So we beat them by three years.
IGN: Going back to the original conversation you had with Phil Harrison, did you have any idea how much this would snowball? Your expectations for the project couldn't have quite matched what it's become?
Alex Evans: We were like 'let's make the best *******ing game in the world', but I think secretly we didn't think it was going to be like this. You know when you have a super high goal, like 'we're going to win the world cup', and then you're happy when you make the quarter-finals. We seem to have got to the finals.
IGN: Sack boy's become a figurehead for the PlayStation 3, and he's now the most identifiable part of the brand. Is that a shock at all?
Alex Evans: I don't think any of us have taken stock really. It sounds really weird, but as Kareem says, it hasn't ended.
David Smith: That point at where you reflect on what you've done, there hasn't really been the time for that, because we're still in the thick of it.
IGN: At Leipzig this year, there were colossal Sack boy's, and it was like the game had taken over the whole town. You must see that and think 'this is insane'.
Alex Evans: I didn't get to go to Leipzig, but I got thousands of text messages going '*******ing hell, you've taken over Germany'.
Kareem Ettouney: When you look back, you never have the ambition to do something that rocks. You would like that and you always hope for that, but I think that when you think and remember every conversation and argument and battle that we had when making the game, it's all very objective.
Alex Evans: The thing I always think about is how loads of people have really understood it really well, and one of the reasons it's perceived so well on the PlayStation 3 and Sony have pushed it and people have responded positively, the metacritic rating is insane. That's the thing that makes me most happy this quite abstract game that was so hard for us to pitch originally has been not only been picked up but loved by so many different people. That I couldn't have planned for.
David Smith: Within the office we are still quite sheltered from the public perception of the game. We're just working on the practical issues of working on the game and making it better. When you get all this praise you kind of have to ignore it a bit if you listen to it too much and care about it too much, you'd stop making the game, or we'd get confused about what we're doing and start chasing [the adulation]. And that isn't why we're doing it, we made it because we had this great ambition and we wanted to express ourselves, so in some ways all that external attention is distracting.
IGN: The critics love it, but initial sales of LittleBigPlanet were slow. Do you think the public at large get it?
Alex Evans: I'm really happy with the sales, because I know how few games turn a profit so quickly. It's a double edged sword. I think a lot of the disappointment comes from hard times and the recession, and then the fact that there was so many insanely big games that came out at once. There's all these different reasons that you could be disappointed with the sales and look at it that way, or you can say we kept pace with the Fallouts etc. Every other game that we were keeping pace with was a third or fourth iteration, and this is our first one.
Kareem Ettouney: It's a new IP, new company and new business model, so reaching the critic was always foremost. We really are very pleased with the perception and the numbers, and this game was always seen as something that would grow.
David Smith: With a typical blockbuster model, a game comes out and everyone either buys it or doesn't within the first couple of weeks, and then it goes off the radar. But we're looking to continually improve the product, such as with the Metal Gear Solid pack. Every few months, and hopefully more often, this thing improves so it stays visible and people stay excited.
Alex Evans: I've actually started thinking about this game so much more like the online games. MMOs etc are the evolving community, but LittleBigPlanet isn't an MMO. I think that we've learnt a lot in terms of the development since it's been released what it means to update. For a lot of games, patching and things is all a negative thing, it's about fixing bugs, but for an online game community patching is about new features. It's about helping the community more. LittleBigPlanet and many other games LittleBigPlanet's leading the charge on the console for the evolving community game.
IGN: So it's more like a platform within itself than a game.
Alex Evans: Yes, and that's how we're treating it.
Kareem Ettouney: The most important thing about LittleBigPlanet is not that it does blockbuster sales, but that it survives. We want it to be around, and we want the community to stay there, and as long as they're there that's when it grows.
Alex Evans: This all leads up to questions about a sequel.
IGN: You don't exactly seem like the kind of people who are going to be doing a sequel though.
Alex Evans: Right. When I told people we're not going to do a sequel, they thought that we were lowering our support for it. A new way of answering that question is that we're putting all the creative ambition of a sequel in, but we might not end up calling it a sequel. We've got a really picky team of brilliant primadonnas, so to motivate them we've got to be doing something completely amazing, otherwise they'd all get bored. And so it's not just for the outside world, but for that lot.
IGN: I'll admit to being quite cynical about the Metal Gear add-on when the screens first leaked, thinking it was little more than the addition of a pretty neat costume. But playing through it today I was blown away, and the Paintinator in particular completely changes the game.
Alex Evans: Absolutely. We did that [the Paintinator] in a month of dev work and a month of wrap-up work.
Kareem Ettouney: Creatively, everything we do in LittleBIgPlanet is along those lines. We want to increase what people can do and enhance their experience. It's not just more of the same. Even when we think about the smallest wig, it'll be a wig that there's nothing like in the game.
Alex Evans: We know how to do user generated content pretty well now; we made mistakes but we're still learning from them. A lot of other studios are still at stage one, and we're now in the really enviable and exciting position of having the basics down and being able to ask how do we ****** people up again (in a nice way).
IGN: Were you anticipating some of the copyright issues that blighted the game early on?
David Smith: We always had plans for dealing with that, but there were some problems in the process that we hadn't forseen. We learnt from it, and Sony worked really hard to resolve it.
Alex Evans: There were three issues; one was negative and two were positive. The negative one was how hard it was to get worldwide legal harmony, because different countries have different laws around copyright infringement. We knew that people would be creative, and that there would be references. It was hard getting the right balance on a worldwide angle. But then there's been these two mad positives; one was the high quality of the levels, including the infringing ones. The other point is the number of IP owners who came up to us and said please whitelist us we'll never ever ask you to pull infringing stuff. I can't say who that is, but those two things really shocked me, I think it shocked [the IP holders], who were like, hang on, my IP's being represented and it's being represented really well. The IP holders have to have last say over the representation of their brand, and that's fair enough, so we've always got to have a method for people misusing a brand, but what's been really lovely is how well represented so many brands are.
David Smith: The concern was how people could take existing IP and refer to it in a really negative way. But there hasn't been a problem with that.
Alex Evans: A lot of people asked us before it came out about how Spore had issues with the so-called penises, and that's going to happen because every kid draws a knob on the blackboard at school, but we were all really surprised by how few there were. In LittleBigPlanet, people's second instinct might be to draw a knob, but the first instinct is to actually have a go at making something fun and enjoyable. I'm really glad that the penis factor has gone down in the ranking.
David Smith: Even if there was no pulling of offensive comment, I'm sure you could go through a hundred levels and find nothing objectionable.
Kareem Ettouney: The numbers are amazing, and we've got a system so that when IP holders get upset about anything we address it, but one thing about copyrights and IPS, there's a dark side to it but there's a completely awesome side to it. It's like hip hop being completely about refactoring, and about classic art refactoring ancient art. And there's an inevitable sort of relationship between creative minds that one must never try to kill.
IGN: Going back to the updates to the title having seen the gun, it seems that so much is possible. There was talk although it was tongue-in-cheek of first person LittleBigPlanet. How far can you take the concept?
David Smith: There's a certain point where we'd want to stop transforming it, there's definitely some underlying rules that we wouldn't want to violate, but from there who knows? There's nothing off the table, so something as mad as a first person viewpoint if you think of the way you create environments, that's a radical change. But if it's something that the community wanted, we'd totally listen to that. At the moment there's so much crazy stuff that we could do within this 2.5D context, we'd like to milk that more.
At this point in the interview, Alex gets up from his seat and walks to the other side of the room, leaving us feeling rather nervous. We've had some bad interviews before, but never had anyone walk out on us. He spends the next few minutes tinkering with the debug PlayStation 3 in the corner of the room.
Kareem Ettouney: There are more ideas than there is time and people. We've got enough IP holders interested, and so many ideas for enhancements, tools, expansions and gadgets that we'd literally need ten years. So we are going to pick our battles and pick our priorities. The point where we feel like we've exhausted all that is when we'd add a new engine or new viewpoint.
It appears we haven't lost him after all; having toyed with the camera in the debug mode of LittleBigPlanet, Alex gives us a taste of first person LittleBigPlanet, and it looks amazing.
Alex Evans: There's no reason why features like this could never make it.
The next few minutes are spent playing through part of a level from this new perspective and a few others as well, as we're witness to a Gears of War style third person view. Though the 2.5D levels of LittleBigPlanet understandably mean a first person mode is, for now, something of an eccentric proposition, it goes to show the versatility of the engine, and indeed the team at Media Molecule.
IGN: Given that you're such a small team, how long will support continue for LittleBigPlanet before you move on to your next project?
David Smith: It's about supporting the community, so it's whatever works. When we move onto different products, it's all about working out how to keep that community happy. So the decision we're making is tied into what the community wants. If they want something that's completely new and buy that on Blu-ray, then that's the right thing, if they want lots of downloads and upgrades then...
Alex Evans: I think what's going to keep it going is the online. People become rabid you know how people love high scores, and achievements and trophies, they're really passionate about it and compare their gamerscores and trophy cabinets online. Take that and multiply by a trillion for people who've just spent twenty hours making a level. Fanboy's the wrong word, but the level of investment people have in their levels is massive, so it's something that's quite powerful for us. When we did the beta trial, we thought all the levels would suck, because the ones from our internal trials had sucked. But within 24 hours there were awesome levels, and suddenly we had to rethink and go, we should take all this content and put it in the game.
David Smith: There has to be a new word for these people. Because the word fanboy is for people on the sideline cheering this is a game where you're actually making content yourself. What do you call that?
Kareem Ettouney: The creators, I think. Every level I've seen from the community is so much better than I could do.
