After Phil Harrison gave the go ahead to the team to build a prototype, things got serious…
“We needed a team. You have to have your team, and it has to be an all rounded team - Getting a rounded team was something we did accidentally on purpose really well. So we were really lucky that we had most bases covered from a very early stage.”
“It was Me, Mark and Dave. Kareem was kind of interested but was also looking into other options, but we knew he was going to come on board; he did some art for the pitch. We’d also met Chris by now and we had Francis pegged too, but we needed a producer. We can’t go into a pitch with just a bunch of coders, artists and a business guy”
“We had this brain-wave of Siobhan. We’d never worked with her before, but we knew she was this really great producer, and she was our friend.”
“She worked at Critereon, and we really liked the idea that whilst we were from Lionhead, our production could come from Critereon who shipped like clockwork, and who Sony knew well.”
“Trouble is, she was in the middle of leaving to go to Australia… so we got in touch with her, and somehow convinced her to come back and do a start-up with us!”
(I asked Siobhan about this later “I was on holiday!” she said. “Not leaving!”
Alex’s version is way more dramatic though, let’s stick with that.)
“We had all these meetings in a pub called The Jovial Sailor which I believe is the pub where Bullfrog was founded too, so it has a weird bit of history. We’d meet up for lunch every day with Chris, who had already had recent experience of building a start-up, and so knew what was going on. He would set us massive homework lists to look for offices and open bank accounts and things.”
“Mark’s Girlfriend of the time found us a brilliant book keeper - Mags, and also found our offices, which we got on a short term lease because they were planning to knock the building down, which they never have, but which was really handy because we didn’t know if we were going to be around in six months, let alone three years which is the normal kind of lease. ”
“They let us paint it too, the first pay check from Sony was spent on paint and we spent the first couple of weeks giggling like children and going to buy doorbells and things.”
By now it was February 2006, Media Molecule had its name, although was very nearly called Brainfluff or Rethink Games. Mark had insisted though that the word ‘games’ wasn’t in the company name in case they wanted to make something else some day.
Up until this point it had been a lot of planning and decorating, building PCs and getting set up, but now there was work to do.
“We needed to build the team up so that we could create the Greenlight demo and we were lucky enough to be able to add Anton, Jonny & Rex to the team quite early on. With our team assembled, we were ready to go…”
“When we finally got hold of PS3 Dev kits, we ported YellowHead over in an afternoon, and it was running at 60 fps, and we thought, ‘brilliant this is going to be easy!’ Within two months we had something that was recognisably LittleBigPlanet, but without Sackboy, and at the end of the six months we showed what we had to Phil and Sony, and they gave us a thumbs up and some money!”
It was on.