Beautiful Teams

Chapter 3. Building Video Games

Mark Healey

LittleBigPlanet has been one of the most hotly anticipated games of 2008 for the PlayStation 3, and by all accounts it's one of the best games of the year. Not only is it a ridiculously addictive platformer, but it's also a creative tool that lets gamers build and share their own levels. The combination of great game play and social networking is a winner for the game's creator, Media Molecule, which was founded a few years ago by Mark Healey. We wanted to know what it was like working on a game like this, so we sat down with Mark.

Andrew: Jenny's been utterly addicted to LittleBigPlanet, and I love it. You guys just did a phenomenal job.

Mark: Well, thank you very much. I've actually been quite addicted to it myself.

Jenny: It's a great game. It really, really is. That's what made us want to talk to you. We wanted to hear the story behind how this game came about. Since this book is really focused on teams and how they come about, we'd love to kind of hear the story of how you guys came together to build this.

Mark: OK, let me think. I'm going to have to use my memory, which is normally a bit of a disaster ….

The company was founded by me, Alex Evans, Dave Smith, and Kareem Ettouney, with a lot of help from a guy called Chris Lee, who's the business-minded person.

Apart from Chris, all of us had worked together and been friends at our previous company, Lionhead Studios.

We were always working together on various things, and one day I decided ...