When you put out a new piece of content, like the Metal Gear pack with the Paintinator, do you fear that period directly afterwards when everybody does the same thing, before a few people start really innovating?
I love that question because it’s the topic I’m most passionate about. I love that period. I think that innovation, originality, talent - all these words are overrated, created by society to undermine a lot of other things. I’ll give you a few examples: Rubens in fine art. I love that example, I always say it. Rubens in the beginning of his career rode all the way to Italy to copy all Michelangelo’s work. And he spent, like, five, ten years just copying Michelangelo’s work. And even when he was an established master in Europe, he would meditate by copying Titian’s stuff. And then you have people like Picasso doing riffs on Velasquez, or the Beatles spending the first part of their career completely doing rock and roll, playing Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley and all that before they started creating their own stuff. Now that is the only way - there is no option - that is the only way to find your voice. Actually originality for the sake of originality is the oldest, most thin thing that you can do. It’s basically like you go and you see installation art or something that is divorced from thousands and thousands of years of human imagination. What you want to always do is celebrate the fusion. There is no way that you’re not original. There is only one of you, so there’s always some subtleties that make everything yours and own it. So if you’re influenced for a while by Metal Gear or if you’re influenced for a while by ET, fine, it’s great – because you’re connecting, jamming with that, being like the Beatles when they were playing Elvis Presley.



You created an extremely expansive game that had to come out according to a deadline. If you had infinite time, infinite resources, what kind of things would you have done differently during LBP’s development?
Hard question. The thing about LBP is basically trying to find that sweet spot between empowering and user-friendliness. In the beginning we did some treatments which were almost trying to make tools into power-ups, like a sponge gun or another thing that cuts through material, all held by Sackboys. It made nice concept art, but you can’t really make a level of any decent quality out of that, so we went back to the drawing board. What we managed to come up with was definitely the best we could do at the time. The beauty of the model that we adopted for LBP is that it’s a platform where you can expand, keep on adding, adding, adding to the community more and more. There is one is coming that I’m so excited about, a simple one. Someones you want to stick something on a material and cut the material around it to take the shape of the sticker. The simple idea is the sticker being like a cutter and you put it on the material and it cuts out the shape. Things like that are all coming and hopefully we’ll be able to add and add.

LBP to the general public was a hot game at Christmas and now it's old news, and yet it’s now a far better game than it was when it came out. Do you in some ways regret LBP being so early on in this evolution from games being something you buy in a box to being an online, extensible platform?
Well no - we are so humbled and excited by that, and wait until you see what’s coming as well. As long as you inspire people hopefully they’ll keep on enjoying it. But what I really want to say about that is that the game industry for a long time was so powerful as a technology-driven kind of platform, and in the last 10, 15 years you start seeing cinema taking over games - huge cutscenes and lip-synching and trying to make immersive stories and believability of the world. But what we’re trying to do in LBP is to focus on expression, not impressiveness. We’ve given the bits to the people and people have - for example, the guy who made a wedding proposal. That is never going to be topped for that particular person because of the personal aspect. If we get the best studio in the world to do that level, it’s not going to mean to that person’s partner as much as his one because of the personal element. This is what LBP is all about. It’s the power of the personal and the indispensability of the individual.

Ettouney will be speaking, along with co-co-founder of Media Molecule Mark Healey, about the art of LittleBigPlanet at this year’s Develop Conference, which will take place in Brighton from 14-16 July. Visit www.developconference.com to find out more.