LittleBigPlanet Reaches 1 Million User-Created Levels

One of the best games of 2008 has reached a milestone. LittleBigPlanet on the Playstation 3 now has 1 million user-created levels. LittleBigPlanet was first shown to the public in early 2007. While the game was exclusive to the Playstation 3, Nintendo and Microsoft also had the chance to pick it up. In the end, however, Media Molecule chose to work with Sony. This should come at no surprise given the strong relationships Sony has with their first and second party development studios.

More so than the Nintendo Wii and Xbox 360, the Playstation 3 needed LittleBigPlanet. At that time, the high-definition system from Sony was a huge disappointment with little hardware sales to show. Thus, Sony needed something that will excite prospective buyers into buying their expensive system.

Their answer comes in the form of LittleBigPlanet. On the surface, the Playstation 3 looks like a fun 2D physics-based platforming game for up to four-players at a time. The main component of LittleBigPlanet, however, is in its Create and Share features.

You can build your own levels from scratch using items you found while playing the story levels. In fact, Media Molecule built the story levels using the same exact creation tools that are available to the user. Furthermore, you can team up with three other players to help you with your level creation in LittleBigPlanet.

Afterwards, you can upload the level for the rest of the world to play. The sharing system is built similarly to Youtube in which players can rate and comment on the user-created content. There are even "favorite" and "reporting" features in LittleBigPlanet.

The Playstation 3 exclusive went on to win numerous "Game of the Year" awards in 2008. Despite the high critical acclaim, LittleBigPlanet only sold modestly well early on, not the ground-breaking success Sony was hoping for. Still, the slow burn eventually added up to a sizeable community for LittleBigPlanet.

Since launching in late October, LittleBigPlanet has accumulated over a million user-created levels. In other words, a level was created and then uploaded onto the servers every 21 seconds since the game came out. Furthermore, user-created levels in LittleBigPlanet have been played nearly a quarter of a billion times.

You can expect these numbers to grow as LittleBigPlanet will be released on the PSP this fall. Furthermore, Sony is expanding the "Play, Create, Share" genre that LittleBigPlanet started with ModNation Racers.

So while LittleBigPlanet did not light the world on fire like originally thought, the Playstation 3 exclusive game is still a tremendous success for Sony and Media Molecule.