PlayStation Home, the much-anticipated hub of the PlayStation community, isn’t so much a new build as a renovation. It wasn’t just conceived at SCEE’s internal Team Soho (now simply London Studio), during production of mockney crime caper The Getaway – it was The Getaway.

What if, it was asked, rather than shoot and smash your way out of this picture-perfect capital, you could move in? What if you could rent an apartment and find your own entertainment, not within the confines of script and console but online, together?

“Those days,” recalls producer Martijn Van Der Meulen, “when the PS2 broadband adaptor had just been released, there was just this interest in experimentation.” It was a surreal proposition, for sure, back when broadband cost the Earth for those lucky enough to live near a telephone exchange, and even then flowed like cement.

But the target wasn’t then, on PlayStation 2, but later, on the prototyped PlayStation 3. There was a testbed, a networked London district with multiplayer pub games, optimistically titled The Getaway Online. That was just the beginning. Now, unlikely as it seems and 14 months overdue, comes the result.

“I’ve apologised repeatedly and I’m sure I’ll continue,” says Dan Hill, manager of Home for Europe. “Maybe we’d taken our eye off the ball when we announced that first delay. We weren’t quite sure where it was going. Was it a social networking site? A gaming platform? So we changed the focus of our dev teams to make it a more – not hardcore – but concerted gaming proposition. Not just in terms of minigames and what you can actually play while you’re in there, but in making sure you’re surrounded by appropriate content.”

“Nothing like this has ever been done before,” adds Van Der Meulen. “There were a lot of things to find out. We needed a platform-defining experience, so in that sense it really deserved that amount of polish. And if you want to grow it as an online platform and keep adding new content, you need a super-stable version. We have that now.” Hill nods: “We’ll be vindicated when people see it.”

But see what exactly? Home has the advantage of being free to download for anyone on PlayStation Network, which guaranteed its massive launch, but it faces much the same problem as LittleBigPlanet. People can see what it does, but do they know or care what it is? Here goes, then.