GDC 2007: how Media Molecule came to be
From the guys who brought to you the awesome news about their community game LittleBigPlanet showcased by none other than Sony‘s Playstation Home, Media Molecule brings out their (sob?) story about how they came to be at the 2007 Game Developers Conference. While it didn’t reel in the same big numbers that Phil Harrison’s announcement of PlayStation Home did, it didn’t stop Mark Healey and Alex Evans from sharing their story to those who attended anyway.
So, game development tyke Media Molecule was founded in January 2006, some time after Mark Healey left his position as an artist for Lionhead Studios.
During his time there, he designed and created an off-the-wall, mouse-only fighting game on Steam titled Rag Doll Kung Fu, which quickly became popular among Steam players and the PC community.
Even at the company’s infant stages when they were overwhelmed with people looking down on them, Media Molecule were still determined to accomplish something way bigger. With so much talk about the company’s formation as taking a step into the Abyss, Healey and Evans decided that the dive into the realms of nothing would be much more fun with rocket packs.
So with their inspiration locked on community-based successes such as MySpace and YouTube, they set to work on a game locking human interactivity on a grand 3D scale and get someone to pay for it. They cashed in the big “cha-ching!” when after a 2D demo to Sony, the giant said, “We love it.”
So now, the 10-person company is setting out to complete LittleBigPlanet for the Playstation Home setting, coordinating with Sony Computer Entertainment Europe in a development partnership. “We didn’t want to have a them-and-us attitude,” Healey said. “That way if it goes wrong we can blame them.”
The game is being developed through a “four step mega plan,” using an early PS3 developers kit, so that it can be built straight from the ground up over the PowerPC puppy CELL processor. Hopefully, with their communication issues solved across the developer teams, they will be able to deliver LittleBigPlanet the way they had conceptualized it in the first place.
Via Gamasutra
From the guys who brought to you the awesome news about their community game LittleBigPlanet showcased by none other than Sony‘s Playstation Home, Media Molecule brings out their (sob?) story about how they came to be at the 2007 Game Developers Conference. While it didn’t reel in the same big numbers that Phil Harrison’s announcement of PlayStation Home did, it didn’t stop Mark Healey and Alex Evans from sharing their story to those who attended anyway.
So, game development tyke Media Molecule was founded in January 2006, some time after Mark Healey left his position as an artist for Lionhead Studios.
During his time there, he designed and created an off-the-wall, mouse-only fighting game on Steam titled Rag Doll Kung Fu, which quickly became popular among Steam players and the PC community.
Even at the company’s infant stages when they were overwhelmed with people looking down on them, Media Molecule were still determined to accomplish something way bigger. With so much talk about the company’s formation as taking a step into the Abyss, Healey and Evans decided that the dive into the realms of nothing would be much more fun with rocket packs.
So with their inspiration locked on community-based successes such as MySpace and YouTube, they set to work on a game locking human interactivity on a grand 3D scale and get someone to pay for it. They cashed in the big “cha-ching!” when after a 2D demo to Sony, the giant said, “We love it.”
So now, the 10-person company is setting out to complete LittleBigPlanet for the Playstation Home setting, coordinating with Sony Computer Entertainment Europe in a development partnership. “We didn’t want to have a them-and-us attitude,” Healey said. “That way if it goes wrong we can blame them.”
The game is being developed through a “four step mega plan,” using an early PS3 developers kit, so that it can be built straight from the ground up over the PowerPC puppy CELL processor. Hopefully, with their communication issues solved across the developer teams, they will be able to deliver LittleBigPlanet the way they had conceptualized it in the first place.
Via Gamasutra