Tag Archives: Alex Evans

Media Molecule co-founder Alex Evans has confirmed the company is now split into three groups. One is the studio management team, another is working on Tearaway, and a third section is producing an “unannounced” product.

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Sony has provided more details on its gamescom presence, starting with its press conference which kicks off at 7.00pm CET/6.00pm BST on August 14. It will be streamed live from the PlayStation Blog. A panel discussion will also take place, the topic being “games as art”, and it will include: SCWW president Shuhei Yoshida, Ian Dallas, co-founder of Giant Sparrow, Kellee Santiago, co-founder of thatgamecompany, Alex Evans, co-founder of Media Molecule, Adam Volker from Moonbot Studio, and a special guest “working on a currently unannounced project.” The panel will be streamed live as well. Gamescom runs August 15-19.

Media Molecule co-founder Alex Evans said during a panel at Develop this morning that at one time, Sony wanted the firm’s LittleBigPlanet to launch as a free-to-play title.

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Media Molecule has said this morning that deciding not to do another LittleBigPlanet was similar to a child leaving home, adding its now added 1.5 million users since the PSN outage. Find a full report inside from the Develop keynote by Lewie Procter.

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Develop organisers have announced that the opening keynote of the event, a chat with LittleBigPlanet developer Media Molecule and ex-SCE WWS head Phil Harrison, will be the main headliner later this month. Harrison, who first brought the company to Sony’s attention, will interview co-founders Alex Evans, Mark Healey and Kareem Ettouney for a session called “Living Inside a Molecule” on July 20.

Develop takes place in Brighton between July 19-21.

Media Molecule head Alex Evans has told VG247′s Joe Anderson that LittleBigPlanet 2 was delayed into 2011 because not all PS3s are connected to the internet and capable of receiving a patch.

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Mark Rein. In a bubble bath. Playing with Halo and Gears of War dolls. Enough said.

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Media Molecule’s Alex Evans has said that sometime after LBP2 is released, the firm will put out a patch that will contain creation tools for the controller.

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Media Molecule’s Alex Evans has told Edge that the recently-revealed LittleBigPlanet 2 might not be 100 percent fully backwards compatible with its predecessor.

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Media Molecule co-founder Alex Evans has revealed that one of the reasons why LittleBigPlanet 2 is a disc-based title, and not a massive DLC expansion, is to reach a “wider audience”.

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Will there be a LittleBigPlanet 2? Well, let’s see. Media Molecule boss Alex Evans isn’t prepared to say.

“I’d love there to be a sequel, put it that way,” he told GI.

“But that’s not an announcement – although I will say that the entire team is working on LBP.”

LBP2 confirmed. There’s a full interview through there.

Media Molecule co-founder Alex Evans has told 1UP that a web-based platform for sharing LittleBigPlanet levels is on the way.

The system will allow players to advertise their levels to other users and queue up PS3 downloads for the next time they turn the game on.

“Rather than going on forums and saying, ‘Please search for my level,’ you can just say, ‘Here’s a link’,” said the exec, speaking at Nordic Game in Sweden this week.

There’s lots more through there. No date, though.

Media Molecule’s Alex Evans and Mark Healey revealed at GDC 09 that LittleBigPlanet is only really half finished.

“We still feel like we’re halfway through the development of LittleBigPlanet, to be honest,” said Healey.

“I claim that LittleBigPlanet is potentially a game creation package, which isn’t finished if you like, but potentially.”

“We want LittleBigPlanet to be something that enables people to make games, not platform game levels.”

The least-finished part of the game is the content creation side of things, said Evans. Read what he has to say about that, and more, over at Eurogamer.

Media Molecule’s Alex Evans has teased Gamasutra with a taste of the firm’s next LBP project.

He said he cannot go into details at the moment, but did say the unannounced title would be “really fucking cool.”

Evans said the idea for the title came to Media Molecule during a “brainstorming session”.

“Then at a certain point, we’re like, ‘We’re gonna just take a character, we’re just gonna try this direction”, he said.

“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.

“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.”

A PSP version of LBP has been confirmed to be in development with Sony Cambridge, and is a separate thing from Media Molecule’s in-house work.

User-generated content is “definitely” in Media Molecule’s future Evans said.

“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.”

More through the link.

The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences has announced that Media Molecule’s co-founder Alex Evans, the co-creator of LittleBigPlanet, will speak at DICE later this month.

“Our take on ‘Creative Gaming’ is that it’s an incredibly broad church, and Little Big Planet represents our particular first take on User Generated Content,” said Alex Evans, co-founder of Media Molecule. “The D.I.C.E. Summit gives us the opportunity to present our design philosophy to the industry in the most prestigious forum today.”

DICE, which runs from February 17-20 in Las Vegas, will also host the Interactive Achievement Awards ceremony on February 19, with comedian Jay Mohr to return as host.

Full list of speakers can be found here.

Happy New Year. We’re glad we shut down over Christmas. You didn’t miss a whole lot.

By far the most important story over the break was news that Free Radical cut its workforce by 140 to just 40.

The developer was confirmed as being in administration just before the Christmas holiday.

Speaking to 1UP, Cameron Gunn of administrators ReSolve Partners said, “We made around 140 employees redundant yesterday, effective 31 December (the date up to which they had been paid). We’re still trading on with the remaining 40 or so employees, have advertised the business for sale and have received some strong interest.”

News broke mid-December that staff had turned up for work only to be locked with a notice on the door telling them to adjourn to a nearby hotel.

Free Radical aside, other noteworthy Christmas news included confirmation that Mistwalker JRPG Cry On has been cancelled.

“AQI decided to cancel the project after analyzing the current market environment and forecasts for the future. We deeply apologize for troubling those who were awaiting its release,” said a company rep.

Cry On was apparently part of “Hironobu Sakaguchi’s triumvirate of Xbox 360 titles,” says this 1UP piece (the other two being Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey), and for those of you who don’t know, the game “was to be an action-RPG featuring a Nobuo Uematsu soundtrack [and] character designs by Kimihiko Fujisaka.”

Full round up below.

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This BBC report‘s claiming that the LittleBigPlanet team is already working on a second game.

“Even before the game has hit the shops, the team are already at work on a sequel,” it says.

Hardly a shock, but there you go. Media Molecule boss Alex Evans went on, putting the impending success of the first title down to luck, and managed to use the phrase “blue sky” in his quote.

“There’s been a lot of being in the right place at the right time. When we went to Sony we were a tiny but very experienced team. Sony had to trust in us in terms of the quality of people,” he said.

“It was amazing how much they understood what was a new concept; it was quite blue sky.”

LittleBigPlanet ships next week in Europe.

Ripten’s carrying a video of Media Molecule’s Alex Evans explaining to the BBC what caused the LittleBigPlanet delay, and he confirms that it literally was a single email behind the madness.

Take a look.

Speaking to Kikizo, Sony’s Pete Smith has said that a 3D approach to LittleBigPlanet may not have even been possible, and that plumping for a 2D design wasn’t a “copout”.

“Part of the beauty of the game being 2D is that it keeps it really simple, and that really helps,” he said.

“If you were trying to make your own gameplay in full 3D, there’d be a lot more to consider. I don’t know if it would be possible, but there would be a lot more to think about. We don’t see 2D as a copout.”

There’s a big interview through there Media Molecule’s Mark Healey and Alex Evans, as well as Sony’s Pete Smith. Take a look.

Media Molecule boss Alex Evans has warned against judging LittleBigPlanet on last night’s beta release, saying the distributed version is already out of date.

“Since it’s a beta, it’s already quite an old build,” said the developer on the MM blog.

“We have some cool new stuff that’s been in our private test for a few days, I won’t give it all away but there are things cooking such as 5-star ratings, (much) better performance and less lagginess, better online stability, better UI for publishing, faster downloads…. so in a way playing this version is simultaneously exciting and an odd throwback to a couple of weeks ago.”

Evans also promised that those of you who went begging for a key last night are going to get a second bite of the cherry – more are on the way.

“Beta keys and their distribution are actually entirely in the hands of Sony,” he said. “MM have no control over this, so we can’t help if anyone wants to get on the beta trial, I am certain (100%) there are more keys coming SOON but we’d recommend checking the PlayStation forums and all the usual places for news.”

More through the link.