Using mainly felt-tip pens and cardboard, Media Molecule puts the finishing touches to PS3’s biggest, littlest and strangest game.

What could you make out of a 20 pence piece and a rubber band? Both items are lying on a coffee table inside Media Molecule’s offices when we stop by. Presumably left by a developer searching their pockets for a bus ticket or scrounging about for a pen, in this setting, things like this can quickly assume a deeper significance. Here is an unspoken design challenge: take these, and turn them into something fun.

It’s this inquisitive playfulness that lies at the heart of Media Molecule. The company has yet to finish a single game, but following a stellar unveiling at GDC 2007 its first title has seduced almost everyone who’s seen it.

Part platformer, part oddball level-editor, LittleBigPlanet is brimming with friendly, approachable fun. But things are getting serious: the game is locked in for an October release, and ever since that first public demonstration, it’s had a lot of weight on its cardboard shoulders. Many see this near-indescribable toy as nothing less than the key to broadening the appeal of PlayStation 3.


It all started with friends messing around in the park. In 2005, Mark Healey and a few of his Lionhead co-workers made a kung-fu home movie. The movie became a game, and the game – Rag Doll Kung-Fu – became a download hit. It was this experience that gave the founders of Media Molecule the confidence to leave Lionhead and form their own company in January 2006. “It was a crash course,” admits Healey, who’s now Media Molecule’s creative director. Kareem Ettouney, the company’s art director, is rather more upbeat: “It was empowering. It seeded the idea that you could do things differently.”

Two years later, PlayStation 3’s most important title is being built by a team of just 27 in a small office above a bathroom store. (Media Molecule is planning on moving, but that’s probably because the building’s scheduled to be torn down.) It’s snug rather than dingy, however, and filled with the start-up’s playful touches. Along with the 20 pence piece, visitors are greeted by fairy lights spelling out the word ‘hello’, while a quick tour of the office reveals a ‘person in charge of smoothies’ alongside more traditional coders, level designers and a man who’s been shut in a room and can’t come out again “until he’s made the game run fast” (he looks fairly happy in there, though). As expected, there are eclectic props everywhere: homemade dolls, cartoons and other tributes to the hand-stitched or doodled. Everything celebrates impromptu ingenuity and lo-fi craftsmanship; the business cards here are probably made out of quilt.

But enough of the tour – we’ve come to see how the game’s progressing. The basic idea of LBP should be familiar by now: playing as Sackboy, you use Popit, a mix of menu system and mouseless mouse pointer, to create various physical objects and build 2.5D playgrounds, which can then be uploaded in the name of worldwide time-wasting. Today, Media Molecule is showing us a glimpse of some of the more advanced options – options that take what had the potential to be a knockabout assault-course generator and turn it into a tool for making almost any kind of game you can think of.