David Smith, the co-founder of LittleBigPlanet developer Media Molecule, has announced his departure after 20 years with the studio.
Here’s a snippet of Smith’s leaving message, where he confirms he’s leaving to “focus on personal creative projects.”
20 years ago I founded Mm with some wonderful people. It feels like only yesterday that I was noodling away on the prototype that grew into LittleBigPlanet. Today I’m announcing that I am leaving Mm to focus on personal creative projects. Most of the Mm founders came from Lionhead, a chaotic petri dish of creativity, and I couldn’t have wished for a better training ground. Strongly influenced by that unconventional creativity, Mm was born of a restless yearning to make exciting new experiences that we deeply believe in.
We love making games, and so we naturally wanted to share that joy of creativity with our players. I’m proud to say that of all the games we’ve made, and are making, the spirit of creativity and joyfulness suffuses them all. This has been an unregrettable use of those years.
Media Molecule was founded in 2006 by Smith, Mark Healey, Alex Evans and Kareem Ettouney, and was acquired by Sony Interactive Entertainment (then known as Sony Computer Entertainment) in 2010. The studio worked on LittleBigPlanet, LittleBigPlanet 2, Tearaway, and Dreams, although details on its next project have not been revealed just yet.
However, back in May 2024, Healey said during an interview with MinnMax’s Ben Hanson that Media Molecule’s next project is going to be closer to an actual video game than a creative tool, so presumably it won’t be similar to the likes of Dreams.
[Source – Media Molecule]