Media Molecule in a developer conference today revealed how they had the chance to own the Portal series and how LittleBigPlanet originally could have been a Free-To-Play series.
The company revealed around 2005 they were working on trying to figure out how to make a game based on portals years before Valve released Portal. The game initially was called The Room and was shown in an early concept stage at a Game Developers Conference.
It turns out a studio called DigiPen used that same idea as inspiration and once Media Molecule found out, they started to have meetings with the studio to see if they could combine both projects. In the end, MM decided to abandon their project while DigiPen signed an agreement to work with Valve to eventually create Portal.
Quote:
"We worked on a project that actually was shown at GDC that year. It's lost, but if you dig through the GDC vaults there's this little game that never saw the light of day but that had a bunch of ideas in it."
"It was these clay cubes that you make things out of, and then put them through portals and do very trippy things," said Healey.
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Also revealed that LittleBigPlanet could have been a Free-To-Play game had the studio not wasted the small window of opportunity (and Sony's money) working on videos trying to figure out how they wanted to design the game. Sony ended up being upset at nothing being done and changed the project into a retail release project.
Quote:
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"Phil said all sorts of buzzwords that hadn't really hit yet. He said it should be driven by DLC and that it should be free-to-play, have a social core and premium, paid-for content. From that initial meeting Sony agreed to fund us for six months. But that time was primarily spent making videos to try to explain what this game was going to be, not to Sony, but to ourselves!"
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http://www.videogamer.com/news/how_l...of_portal.html
http://kotaku.com/5823112/what-if-li...n-free-to-play
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Quick News Round-Up:
1) In a rare leak, Nintendo might have accidentally confirmed Gamecube games will be downloadable on WiiWare for the Wii U. One of the reps for the company in an interview accidentally leaked out Gamecube games being playable even though the system itself can't play GC discs.
2) In an update to yesterday's GoldenEye Reloaded news, Activision has confirmed the Xox 360 and PS3 will have extra stuff not found in the Wii version. Both consoles will increase the limit to 16 players for online matches and include a single player Mi5 Special Ops mode while only the PS3 will have motion controls as an option.