LittleBigPlanet

There are a handful of special video game characters who just belong to a particular console. Sonic and Sega, Mario and Nintendo, and during the PlayStation 3 era, Sack Boy and PlayStation. It was arguably the most recognisable PlayStation mascot during this era.

Sometime around 2006, a handful of developers working at the well known Lionhead Studios in Guildford worked on a side project called Rag Doll Kung-Fu which was one of the first third party titles to get published onto Steam. After Microsoft acquired Lionhead studios the same developers found themselves out of a job and so they formed a new company called Media Molecule and pitched a new physics based, rag-doll game to Sony.

Booting up the game today you are thrown straight into the tutorial. It is a tutorial I have never forgotten since I first played it in 2008. The well known British personality Stephen Fry provides the voice of the narrator and guides you through the tutorial. Celebrities had been used in games in various ways with various degrees of success over the years but somehow the use of Stephen Fry here was really significant, for me it was a real signal that this generation of gaming was going to be the one that really started to take gaming from the subculture it was into the mainstream. The tutorial itself was also something quite different, it was deliberate, it did not assume you knew anything about video games, each button and action carefully explained and in a cute and fun way. Names of the developers and photos of them in the background whilst you progressed really brought home that this game was made by real people and not a faceless corporation. You see these elements quite a lot these days especially amongst indie titles but at the time this was definitely not usual, especially for such a big title.

The game itself is a very simple platformer with charming rag-doll animations and physics. You jump through the level with some basic puzzle physics based puzzle solving like moving objects around, smashing into objects causing them to tumble down. The story mode is split into 8 worlds, these are thematic and have a running smaller story inside of them. Each world typically has 3 levels and 3 challenge levels which you have to unlock by finding secrets in the levels first.

Something I do really love about LittleBigPlanet and a reason to still play it today is its use of local multiplayer. The whole story mode can be played with 1-4 players and there are some small sections of the game where collectables can only be achieved by using multiple players. There are so few games that manage to make good use of local multiplayer in this way but this is one of them.

Perhaps the most important part of LittleBigPlanet, and part of the reason for its huge success was its level builder. The story levels were good but where the game really shined was in letting players build their own levels using exactly the same mechanics as the main story missions and then publishing and sharing those levels with the world. The online community for this game thrived. The building and sharing of player made levels is really the central part of the game, as you play through the single player missions your primary collectable is stickers and objects that you use in your level creation and there are tons and tons to collect.

Sadly, as the servers are all closed, none of that functionality still remains. You can still create your own levels but the millions of player-made levels that used to exist can no longer be played. There is so much of the game centered around online capability that the game does feel weird to boot up and play. So many options are greyed out and the leaderboard at the end of the level is just a constant reminder of the way things have gone.

However, there is a dedicated fan base of LittleBigPlanet gamers who have been working to keep the community alive. I have been unable to determine quite how, but a group of gamers managed to get hold of and release an archive of one of the original servers which preserves most of the player-made levels that had been created. Following that another project called LittleBigRefresh provides a custom server reverse engineered from the original. The community has found a way to keep LittleBigPlanet going along with all the custom levels, though the setup does look quite complicated.

Again as the servers have closed down and many of the trophies required the online play the Platinum trophy is no longer available which is a real shame as I think it is a game that would be quite exciting to try and Platinum.

The game was released to immediate fan fare. With 9/10 and 10/10’s across the board from many different review platforms. It regularly appeared in the top 5 on Official PlayStation Magazine UK’s Essential PlayStation 3 games.

The game is still enjoyable to play today. Graphically it has a few rough edges but it almost adds to its charm in a way, the furry edges of the rendering working with sack boys cloth material design. Some of the mechanics are a bit less forgiving, the game is 2D but there are 3 different levels of depth within that plane and swapping between them can be a bit confisuing and the game doesn’t always do you what you expect. Added to that, the platforming and its mechanics are somewhat limited, with the intention that creativity will emerge from a small set of robust physics mechanics.

LittleBigPlanet remains as one of the most iconic PlayStation 3 titles and is a must-have for any collection not least because it has still not been re-released on any other systems and remains trapped on the PlayStation 3.