According to Media Molecule’s co-founder Mark Healey—the creative director on Little Big Planet, its sequel, and Dreams—early on in LBP’s creation, Microsoft was “on the prowl” and trying to “steal” the game from Sony.
In a new interview with MinnMax, Healey goes into great detail about the history of Little Big Planet, his feelings on the LBP3 servers being shut down forever, and more. But perhaps the most interesting story in the interview is a tale about how, after Sony had funded six months of LBP development after being “blown away” by an early pitch, Xbox tried to step in and grab the game post-GDC 2007.
“The funny thing is, we actually didn’t have anything in writing to say that we were actually going to continue with [Sony] or that they even owned what we were doing, is my memory of it,” said Healey, who left Media Molecule in 2023.
“And actually, I do remember after we showed [the Little Big Planet demo] at GDC…someone from Microsoft was on the prowl. And they were kind of trying to steal us, if you like, from going with Sony. And technically, we could have done [that.] We could have been like, ‘Yeah fuck it, let’s go with Microsoft. They are probably going to give us a load of money.’”
But Healey says that the folks at Media Molecule felt doing that would have been “very wrong” and “morally corrupt.”
When asked how serious Microsoft was in its attempt to steal away Little Big Planet from Sony, Healey made it clear that it wasn’t as if a contract was slid in front of them with hard numbers or anything like that.
“[Media Molecule and an Xbox rep] went out and got a bit drunk,” said Healey, “And it was literally—just as we were dropping the (Xbox) guy off at his hotel—he was kind of like ‘Oh shit, I was on a mission here! I’ve got at least say something.’”
“And he was just, ‘Oh you, by the way, guys, you know we would be happy to blah blah blah take you on if you want to jump ship to us’ or something like that. And you could tell he was almost embarrassed to say it, because it would have been a very naughty thing to do.”
Healey then clarified to MinnMax that, thinking about it, it seems wild that Sony had nothing in writing about Little Big Planet after funding it. He suggested that some of the details might have been mixed up, and that “there must have been some legal thing in place to say [Sony] owned [LBP].” But he wasn’t sure and others had told him that, at least early on, that wasn’t the case.
Regardless, when asked if in an alternate timeline, Little Big Planet could have been an Xbox franchise, Healey was blunt: “No, that would never have happened,” and added that Media Molecule liked working with Sony and had developed relationships with people at the company.
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