In an interview on IGN Unfiltered, Phil Harrison, Google’s current VP and general manager for Google Stadia, says the pitch for LittleBigPlanet was the best game pitch he ever saw while he was at PlayStation.
“First of all, that whole thing came about because a guy who worked for me, called Pete Hawley, spent a lot of time in a pub in Guilford with Alex [Evans] and Mark [Healey] from Lionhead and, persuading them over many pints of beer, over many, many months, about leaving and starting their own company [Media Molecule], funded by Sony,” Harrison says.
“They were eventually persuaded to do that. They set up, we funded them, and they came back in to do their first pitch of the game, which is, to this day, the greatest game pitch I have ever seen in my life,” Harrison continues. “And it is not the game you ended up playing, it was a very different kind of experience.”
Harrison also talks about how Sackboy, LittleBigPlanet‘s mascot, underwent a big transformation. He says Sackboy didn’t look like the Sackboy we know today, but it gave everyone enough of an idea to see where Media Molecule was going with it. Additionally, Sony and Media Molecule incubated LittleBigPlanet for one to two years before they unveiled the game at GDC in 2007. While the pitch meeting was only supposed to last an hour, it went on for four hours instead.
“To give you insight into how Alex, in particular, works; rather than use PowerPoint, which is what everyone on the planet used to communicate an idea, he wrote his own interactive version of PowerPoint so that the game could be playable through the presentation. It was just mindblowing,” Harrison says. “That told me enough about the way they think, and the way that they want to innovate, and the way they want to challenge conventions.”
If you’d like to know more about what Phil Harrison had to say, you can check out part one of the IGN Unfiltered interview below.
The post The Pitch for LittleBigPlanet Was “The Greatest Game Pitch I Have Ever Seen,” Says Former Sony Exec Phil Harrison by David Gill appeared first on DualShockers.