Media Molecule's Evans Teases New LBP Project

Author: by Staff

What's next for Media Molecule after the smash success of LittleBigPlanet? Studio co-founder Alex Evans can't yet say much on the new direction -- except that it's "really fucking cool." In a new Gamasutra feature interview exploring what the studio's up to now, Evans recalls a recent brainstorming session: "And then at a certain point, we're like, 'We're gonna just take a character, we're just gonna try this direction.'" "It's a quite interesting thing because it was like a magnet. Everyone sort of [joined in] on that thing, then I suddenly saw these people kind of going, 'Oh my god, far from being tired of LBP, I suddenly see this untapped potential,'" he says. "And in ways that hopefully will still be fresh so when it comes back, people won't be like, 'Yeah, they just exploited that thing, and it's really fucking obvious that they would do that.' I think LBP is in their future, and hopefully in surprising ways." Shortly after the AIAS awards, a PSP version of LittleBigPlanet was confirmed to be in development in association with Sony Cambridge -- but this work is separate from Media Molecule's in-house development described above. User-generated content "definitely" continues to be in the studio's future, Evans adds, taking a longer-term brainstorm at the kind of projects the Guildford, UK-based developer would like to be involved with: "We started the company and we called it 'creative gaming' rather than [that]... As I said in the talk, there's a very broad church. We can actually pick a different bit of the spectrum." He concludes of different styles of games the developer might eventually attempt: "So, it doesn't have to be LBP-style creativity. It could be musical, or it could be God knows what. I think there's definitely a fixation at Media Molecule around the idea of engaging players creatively."