Cunningly complex

Legendary game developer Peter Molyneux has pitched many preposterous ideas in his time, but even he was baffled by LittleBigPlanet. Chatting with EDGE magazine as part of a studio spotlight feature, Media Molecule’s Alex Evans has revealed that the Populous creator was one of the first people to sample the company’s customisable platformer. “We let him see it, and he told us it was too ambitious,” he said.

Elsewhere in the interview, Evans admitted that the studio has no regrets over its decision to join Sony’s stable of first-party developers. “We were really happy working with Sony, and I was really bored of trying to work out what the alternative was,” he admitted. “The scary thing with Sony was that they were our first choice, and we’d never looked at anything else. Because of that, [executive producer Siobhan Reddy] and I spent a year looking at other options. At the end of it, we went, ‘You know what? It’s fine.’ I mean, I’ve coded pretty much constantly for the last two years now, and not had to spend my time worrying about other things.”

Media Molecule is currently working on two titles: the recently announced Tearaway for PlayStation Vita, and a top-secret project rumoured to be for PlayStation 4. According to Evans, the former didn’t even have a name or logo when Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida decided to announce it at GamesCom. “We weren’t planning to show Tearaway at GamesCom,” the technical director said. “Then we did an internal update where we said, ‘Hey guys, you’re here so we might as well show you the latest build.’ Shuhei was like, ‘Right, we’ll show this at GamesCom.’ I think that kind of risk-taking helps us to keep a kind of indie process now, the same as when we were just Media Molecule on our own.”

There’s plenty more about Tearaway in EDGE’s excellent feature. Point your browser through here for the full story.

[source edge-online.com]