LittleBigPlanet Hub, a free-to-play live service take on the adorable PlayStation platformer series that was announced over 10 years ago and then never saw the light of day, has popped back into the conversation thanks to a video showing working footage of an early beta build of the game.
You can find the footage here, which goes for just over seven minutes and features the familiar voice work of series’ regular, Stephen Fry, narrating a tutorialised section of the game. The footage was reportedly recorded in 2013, presumably under an NDA that’s long-since expired or is no longer relevant.
The footage also showcases the game’s online and community-focused elements, some of which would later be folded into 2014’s Sumo Digital-developed LittleBigPlanet 3 and 2020’s Sackboy: A Big Adventure. According to a follow-up from the poster of the footage, the beta build is still downloadable for those with access and said build has seemingly since been archived and dumped onto the internet as well.
Here’s a look at the original announcement trailer for LittleBigPlanet Hub:
It’s interesting to think that Sony was testing the waters of a live version of one of its biggest franchises long before its more recent and public eyeing-off of the live service pie, only to wind up canning it – much like it has with The Last of Us multiplayer project. If anything, LittleBigPlanet would have, and still could, lend itself quite comfortably to the concept with its support for user-generated content and plethora of potential Sackboy cosmetics.
Original LittleBigPlanet developers MediaMolecule also recently (allegedly) canned a project of their own, with a PS5 and PC port of the fantastic Dreams supposedly being nearly finished and then abandoned.
According to insider/dataminer and fellow Aussie Lance McDonald, we were actually closer to seeing those dreams realised than we initially thought. Dropping the news during a livestream (which was picked up by wccftech), McDonald claims that an enhanced port of Dreams was not just in the works at Media Molecule but was nearly complete before the studio was affected by layoffs.
A source told McDonald that the game on PS5 and PC would have featured ray-tracing features and keyboard/mouse support, two things that would have absolutely elevated the Dreams community’s already-incredible creations to the next level.
