Alex Evans interview on Gamesindustry.biz

The headline says it all, it’s good when that happens isn’t it? Our beloved hat lover Alex was interviewed by the team at GI.biz whilst at the Nordic Game conference recently, where he talked all things LittleBigPlanet, check it out!

A number of key industry figures have said to me that they considered LittleBigPlanet to be possibly the most important title released in 2008 – not based on sales, but because of what it represented for user-generated content. What are your thoughts on that?

Alex Evans: Well, that’s amazing. I remember when we first revealed it at a GDC, we got Peter Molyneux in as an old friend to play it, to see what he thought, and his reaction was: “It’s too ambitious,” which was an enormous compliment, coming from him…

To hear things like that, that it’s important, it’s really good. Post-release it was really interesting because we’d never run a community before, and the industry is changing really fast. The way you do post-release, the way you do add-ons and the way you maintain your community… the MMO guys have got it down, I think – we could learn from them.

I was actually talking to the Sony guys a lot after release, saying that I’d love to look at the way we treat LBP as an MMO. It’s not an MMO at all, and so people were a bit confused, asking me if it was going to become an MMO… I said that almost every game has to be supported with that kind of service mentality, so lots of stuff that I’m working on personally at the moment is geared to that mentality.

The way we’ve structured the team – because everybody at Media Molecule is still doing LBP – we very consciously decided to stick to a focus. Within that we’ve divided it up, and we’ve got all these different features cooking, and we decide very late how they get released and what channel they’re released through.

What I love about the way LBP was received by the industry – but also the players – is that you can jump into it at different levels. You can just play it, and enjoy that side of it, or you can look at it as a platform for expressing yourself.

We haven’t succeeded everywhere, but we’ve definitely tried to do a lot.