LittleBigPlanet is a platform game whose levels were all made with the tools it gives its players. Media Molecule’s team built the story levels in the same editor anyone could open from a menu above their character’s head, and then left the players to make the rest. By 2010 they had uploaded 2.3 million levels and played them, Edge reported, “somewhere around half a billion times”. Among them were tributes to other games and a working calculator.
The star was Sackboy, a button-eyed, zip-fronted fabric doll who ran, jumped and pulled faces in a papercraft world. Sony announced the game at the Game Developers Conference in 2007, when Media Molecule had little more than what it showed on stage. “Every byte we had ever written,” the studio director, Siobhan Reddy, remembered.
Fast facts
- Developer: Media Molecule, Guildford, founded in 2006 by Mark Healey, Alex Evans, Dave Smith and Kareem Ettouney, who had worked together at Lionhead.
- Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment.
- Released: PlayStation 3, October 2008 in North America and November 2008 in Europe.
- Sales: over three million by mid-2010 (Edge); 4.5 million by 2013 (Retro Gamer).
- Player levels: 2.3 million uploaded by mid-2010.
Making the tools the game
The idea grew from the founders’ own childhoods. In 2012 Edge placed Alex Evans and his colleagues in “the Spectrum and Commodore generation” (“I was Spectrum, [Mark Healey] was Commodore,” Evans said). That was a generation for whom programming was built into the machine, Evans said, “and we kind of missed that”. He talked about the tinkerer, and a time when “everything was mechanical, cars were things you were allowed to tinker with — think of Dad in a garage”. Edge explained what the game did with that: “By representing the mechanics of its levels with mechanical objects, LittleBigPlanet helped players understand how to make their own without entering the arcane world of programming.”
Getting there took several attempts. The first version of the creation mode that Sony approved was, Evans said, “purely physical”: the player pressed a button and was pulled into another universe where there were paint cans to run over and pick up, and painting anything high up needed a friend with a jetpack. It was fun, Dave Smith recalled, but nothing anyone made with it was any good. The physicality was dialled down and the Popit, the pop-up menu that hovers over Sackboy, was added. Peter Molyneux, their old boss at Lionhead, was the first person outside the company to play it. “He told us it was too ambitious,” Evans said.
What players got was a box of materials and machines. Shapes could be cut from materials such as sponge, stone and metal, each with its own physical behaviour, and brought to life with motors, switches, pulleys and pistons. Levels were built on three planes of depth, so Sackboy could step forward and back as well as run and jump. Stickers and decorations went on top, and the finished level could be published over the PlayStation Network for anyone to play.
Players’ levels
Players soon found the limits and then went past them. Edge, looking at the sequel’s beta in 2010, listed the kinds of level that had made the first game’s “Cool Levels” chart: “pastiches and proofs of concepts, like the Shadow Of The Colossus and God Of War levels, LittleBigCalculator and Sweet Child O’Mine”, which “demonstrated vast invention and imagination, but only within its three-plane 2D”. Few, it added, approached the polish of Media Molecule’s own levels.
Keeping up with them was hard. “Nothing in PlayStation was really built for this,” Evans told Edge. “We lost a year to it, a whole year that was just grind.” By 2012, he said, the series was being run as a “virtual studio” of people spread across Sony and several other developers. Some players turned their levels into careers: Wireframe told of a creator whose work in LittleBigPlanet 2 caught Sony’s attention, which sent him to Sumo Digital, the studio making the next game.
The series
| Game | Year | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| LittleBigPlanet | 2008 | PlayStation 3 |
| LittleBigPlanet (PSP) | 2009 | handheld version by Sony’s Cambridge studio |
| LittleBigPlanet 2 | 2011 | tools for making whole games, not only levels |
| LittleBigPlanet PS Vita | 2012 | handheld version |
| LittleBigPlanet Karting | 2012 | kart-racing spin-off |
| LittleBigPlanet 3 | 2014 | developed by Sumo Digital |
| Sackboy: A Big Adventure | 2020 | 3D platform game by Sumo Digital |
The PSP version showed how much the idea depended on its machine. Edge found it a “tiny marvel” as a platform game, but building on a handheld called for “a steady hand and maybe even a watchmaker’s eyeglass”. LittleBigPlanet 2 opened the tools up further, and Media Molecule went on to make Tearaway and Dreams; see Media Molecule.
The servers close
The community’s levels lived on Sony’s servers. In 2021 the servers for the PlayStation 3 and Vita games were taken offline after attacks, and in September that year Sony closed them for good, leaving only the PlayStation 4 version of LittleBigPlanet 3 online. That went offline in January 2024, and in April Sony said that it would stay offline: “All online services including access to other players’ creations for LittleBigPlanet 3 are no longer available.” The story levels still play from the disc, but the millions of levels players made can no longer be downloaded.
Sources
- Edge issue 215, June 2010, pp. 49–55: LittleBigPlanet 2 (over three million copies of the first game sold; 2.3 million levels uploaded and played around half a billion times; three million owners).
- Edge issue 222, Christmas 2010, p. 40: the LittleBigPlanet 2 beta (the first game’s Cool Levels, the Shadow of the Colossus and God of War levels, LittleBigCalculator, “Sweet Child O’Mine”; three-plane 2D; “two-million-plus creator levels”).
- Edge issue 244, September 2012, pp. 11–13: Alex Evans on the Spectrum and Commodore, the tinkerer, and representing mechanics with mechanical objects.
- Edge issue 246, November 2012, p. 123: Media Molecule studio profile (the founders and Siobhan Reddy; Molyneux as the first outside player; the GDC 2007 announcement and Reddy’s recollection; the first, “purely physical” creation mode; the Popit; campaign levels built with the players’ tools; the community workload and the “virtual studio”).
- Edge issue 174, April 2007, pp. 49–53: preview of the then-untitled game (the button-eyed, zip-fronted character and its faces; placing, shaping and painting objects; stickers; sharing over the PlayStation Network).
- Edge issue 210, January 2010, p. 92: LittleBigPlanet for PSP (Sony Cambridge; the fabric Sackboy and papercraft world; the materials and actuators carried over from the PlayStation 3 game; the “watchmaker’s eyeglass”).
- Retro Gamer issue 114, May 2013, p. 75: three sequels and a kart spin-off; the original’s 4.5 million sales.
- “Staying independent” (Sumo Digital profile), Wireframe issue 8, February 2019, pp. 20–21: Sumo’s work on LittleBigPlanet 3 and its downloadable content; the player hired through LittleBigPlanet 2.
- Wireframe issue 42, August 2020, p. 24: Sackboy: A Big Adventure announced, by Sumo Digital, a 3D platformer for up to four players. Issue 45, November 2020, p. 95: impressions of the finished game.
- Wikipedia, “LittleBigPlanet” (web, secondary): release dates; three layers of depth; the developers of Karting (United Front Games and San Diego Studio) and the Vita game (Tarsier Studios and Double Eleven); the server closures of 2021 and 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LittleBigPlanet
- “Sony Shuts Down All LittleBigPlanet Servers on PS3 and Vita”, Retroware, 13 September 2021 (web, secondary): the attacks in May 2021 and the permanent closure. https://articles.retroware.com/2021/09/13/sony-shuts-down-all-littlebigplanet-servers-on-ps3-and-vita/
- “Sony confirms LittleBigPlanet 3 shutdown, months after it was ‘temporarily’ taken offline”, Video Games Chronicle, 20 April 2024 (web, secondary): Sony’s statement. https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/sony-confirms-littlebigplanet-3-shutdown-months-after-it-was-temporarily-taken-offline/