Once up on a time, Dave, Alex and Mark all worked together at Lionhead studios. They had worked here together on many projects over the years, and now made up the R&D dept, building conceptual things such as ‘The Room’, stealing bits of Francis and Kareem’s time, and also working on their indie title Rag Doll Kung Fu in the evenings.
The Movies, Fable, B&W2 were in crunch at the time, and they were all under threat of being dragged off ‘The Room’, and being placed in the other various teams to help them ship on time. Having acquired a taste for making things their own way, they began considering their options. Alex especially, according to him, was looking to leave.
“We had tons of options between us... one was going to Valve! They flew us over there for a week, near the end of Rag Doll, and spent a lot of time trying to ... well, hire us.”
“Valve would have been amazingly supportive, but I wanted something with higher risk. We would have used their offices, their tech, it would have been very much continuing to do what we already knew how to do.”
“It was an amazing opportunity, once in a life time, but ultimately we thought, ‘whatever - let’s do a different more risky once in a lifetime!’”
So the team left Lionhead to seek their fortunes, or rather to build something cool for themselves.
For quite some time now, a friend of the gang named Pete had been trying to convince them to pitch themselves to Sony, and once they had left, he finally won them over.
So, shortly after leaving Lionhead, Alex, Mark and Dave and Chris all found themselves in a room with Phil Harrison. They had no real game idea to pitch though, but they did have Flat World.
“Dave had a home project called Flat World that wasn’t a game - it was an orange ball that you could roll around a 2D blue block thing - a map editor and physics engine. It was his physics test bed.” With a bit of modification, this would be the basis of the pitch.
Alex started putting together a presentation tool “I hate Powerpoint” he explains. In fact all the presentations I’ve ever seen Alex give have been with homemade tools - one was two player, one used stop motion animation of real life bits of paper. “This one was a brown cardboard thing you could put slides onto and have them transition.”
“We didn’t have any game or artwork, so we wanted to present ourselves.”
“We had screenshots of games we’d worked on; we had videos of stuff, kind of like a CV / portfolio really. I wanted to present that all in a nice way, so we decided to present that all using Flat World, combining Dave’s code with my presentation thingy, so that the pay off would be, that you go through the presentation, and then it zooms out, and it’s playable”
This part of the presentation was the same as the Mr YellowHead video, a video seen by many an LBP fan, which includes a little yellow headed character who ended up being an unlockable costume for Sackboy.
“What you don’t see in the YellowHead video is that all around the world are slides and the little character is running through the presentation. You don’t notice that until the end, you go through watching it like it’s some mad, weird powery-pointy-zoomy thing, and then at the end we had this prototype of what it might be like to do RDKF on a PS2 controller.”
“So the main thing we’d worked on was the character code, because a key part of RDKF that we liked was that there was no animation, and the characters could be used to act.”
“So then it panned down and there was YellowHead, and we handed him a pad and you could play through a fairly long level, which took about 20 minutes, and that went back through all the slides.”
So began the long history of using LittleBigPlanet instead of a standard presentation tool. It was even used like this at E3 one year by the Sony Bigwigs.
“I also put a drum machine into it.”
[insert record scratch noise here]
Pardon?
“We knew Phil was a drummer, and we knew we wanted to do multiplayer co-op, and we knew we wanted to do creativity. But we didn’t actually know how these would actually turn out being!”
“So, the drum machine was my implementation of the KORG ES-1 drum machine. I even photographed it and made textures from the knobs etc, I’ve always loved audio programming.”
“The cool part about it was that it was multiplayer - so we had two players over the network, and we handed Phil a laptop with one copy on and said ‘OK, here’s some creativity and we’re going to jam together, and there is no other plan’ and hit play.”
“So then I start to make a pattern, and he sees me doing it up on the projector, and he starts doing the same thing, filling snares in and stuff, and for five minutes we were just jamming.”
“It was like online create, but without us even knowing what online create was, but it showed that you could create together with other people, and that it was fun.” “Phil was intelligent enough to know we weren’t pitching a music game, we were just using it as... an analogy.”
Phil was indeed intelligent enough, which meant that after seeing the promise in the team, and after discussing lots of ideas that would later be part of his Game 3.0 manifesto, Phil agreed to fund the team to make a prototype.“Then it all got a bit scary.” Alex laughs.