Can LittleBigPlanet Save Sony's PS3?

That's a remarkable bit of corporate bluster (and pressure), considering that Media Molecule is little more than a 30-person startup in a 1,000 square foot loft above a bathroom showroom in Guildford, outside London. Evans and his co-founders Mark Healey, Dave Smith, and Kareem Ettoune met while developing games for Lionhead Studios, creator of acclaimed role-playing games such as Fable and Black-and-White. When Lionhead shut down at 9 p.m. each night, the future Molecules stayed on for extended coding sessions to build a game of their own. The result, Rag Doll Kung Fu, which they released independently online in the summer of 2005, delivered wildly inventive and goofy fighting action that pitted Rambo-like string puppets against each other and knowingly winked at videogame clichés. Aside from the cool-factor, Rag Doll Kung Fu raised eyebrows with serious gamers because of its sophisticated physics engine, which lets you control your fighter's movements by clicking and moving the arms and feet independently, vastly increasing the character's range of motion. PC Gamer magazine anointed the cult fave "one of the most intriguing games we've ever seen."

None of Rag Doll's critical attention translated into much sales, but the guys were encouraged enough to strike out on their own and launch Molecule. Their big break came sooner than expected. In November 2005, a friend called to say he had scored them a pitch meeting with Harrison at Sony in one week. There was just one problem: They had nothing to show yet. Diehard musicians, they knew they wanted to create something improvisational -- "We wanted to give that feeling when you jack in playing guitar and you're just jamming with your friends," Evans recalls -- so they scrambled together a demo called YellowHead, which featured a rag doll jumping across an onscreen drum machine. Harrison passed on that one, but he saw immediately the potential in what they described as creative gaming. "It was corporate love at first site," he says now.

Sony's hopes for LittleBigPlanet are high; the company is betting that it will be accessible enough for casual players and innovative enough to capture the fascination of hard-core gamers. "We are positive that LittleBigPlanet will cross many age groups," says Scott Rohde, vice president of product development for Sony Computer Entertainment of America. "It delivers on its promise for creative gaming." The company thinks its quirky experiment can achieves sales similar to the recent Wii Fit exercise game for Nintendo, which sold 1.1 million units in its first two months alone. Meanwhile, Media Molecule is brewing up future plans, such as branding Sackboy as a character who will inhabit other games or products.

Evans and his pals have done their part; what remains to be seen is whether gamers will do their part and not only buy LittleBigPlanet but build and share enough ingenious worlds to make it more than an empty platform. After all, if one of the lessons of Web 2.0 is that user-generated content is cheap, another is that cheap doesn't always mean better.