The Media Molecule co-founder Marcos Healey might have left the company back in 2023, but he is still hard at work on LittleBigPlanet. That is, his Commodore 64 demake of the game.
Recently, on Twitter/X, he offered another update on the project that has been in development for a number of years now, giving a list of what he's been working on behind the scenes.
"More time travelling dev adventures with my C64 LittleBigPlanet project," Healey wrote on the social media site. "Added text bubbles (c64 nerds might notice how they overlap the border, am pleased with that!) and tinkered with sound some more. I'm still fumbling around in Goat Tracker but feel I am slowly making progress with it, attempted a re-hash of 'An English Country Garden'..."
It pretty much goes without saying that demake obviously isn't intended to be as fully featured as the original PS3 version, jettisoning the ability, for instance, for users to create their own unique levels.
Instead, he is simply intending for it to be a distillation of the LittleBigPlanet platforming experience, aiming to replicate Sackboy's moveset and some of the game's classic iconography inside an impressive 2D recreation.
“I’ve been doing that for years like an hour a month," Healey told me back in 2023, which is when I first asked him about the project. "That’s really good fun. But yeah, I find it pretty interesting when you take a game idea and you do like what is the most pure essence of it. It’s like a good song will be a good song on an acoustic guitar. It’s that sort of thing.”
On the same voice call where we asked Healey about the demake, Alex Evans, another co-founder of Media Molecule (who left the company in 2020) was also present, and shared just how long Healey has been noodling with a C64 port of the game, referring to an amusing incident that apparently predates the release of the PS3 version, in which Healey played a prank on their producer at Sony.
“Before we were acquired by Sony," says Evans. "Like really early on in LBP, he had this C64 version on a little cart and he’d work on it every now and then. Sony came down to see what we were doing and basically decide what we were doing and pay us our month’s money because we were paid hand-to-mouth, and Mark was like, ‘We’re doing two platforms. Little Big Planet is on two platforms now!’ You could see the horror on the face of our producer: ‘Oh, you’re doing an Xbox port?’ And Mark just replied, ‘C64 and PS3!'"
After Healey left Media Molecule in 2023, we were kind of wondering whether he would continue working on the project, and it's encouraging to see that he's still pressing ahead with it.
You can follow the former Lionhead and Media Molecule dev here to get updates on the project as they emerge. Though, considering Healey has been working on it for years, we wouldn't hold our breath for a release anytime soon.