“I used to play that game for hours with the Konami code as a kid,” Vincent tells me. “It wasn’t until years later that I would eventually complete the game without using the code. It was a glorious day indeed.” In 2009, Vincent would take his childhood love for Contra and channel it into the only obvious outlet; working with other users on popular video game discussion site NeoGAF, he would set about remaking the game in the then-groundbreaking creation and sharing tools offered by LittleBigPlanet.
It’s easy to forget, given how ubiquitous user-generated content has become, just how novel the set of tools made available in LittleBigPlanet was. Whilst the robust level editor plays its part well, I’m talking more about the sharing tools. Sure, it wasn’t the easiest system in the world and fans had to do some of the legwork to spread the word of a really special project, but the basics were there. The LittleBigContra project was hot news back in 2009—no doubt if you were reading any of the major gaming blogs at the time you heard about it.
However, whilst Vince would find a lot of enjoyment in a game that gave him the power to remake a childhood classic sat in front of his console, it wasn’t the tools that LittleBigPlanet had to offer that caught his eye. “At the time, I had no intentions of being much of a contributor,” he says when I ask what drew him to the game. “Being a huge fan of sidescrollers made it a natural ‘next-gen’ title to grab my attention, since it was the chance I had been waiting for to get my hands on a fresh new sidescroller.” Vince was looking forward to seeing what the community could create, sure, but he didn’t expect that it would be him that set the wheels rolling on one of the community projects that went on to define the game.
In late 2009 Media Molecule, the studio behind LittleBigPlanet named the winners of their ‘Sackie’ awards, named for Sackboy, the game’s player character and mascot. Vince and his collaborators — Jaeyden, SaitoHalifax, NinjaMicWZ, El_Beefo, Gevurah22, and RyanardoDavinci — took home the award for ‘Outstanding Achievement’.
CASE STUDY: Team Effort
The beginnings of the LittleBigContra project have something in common with many large-scale pieces of user-generated content: reaching far beyond what one can accomplish. “I began on level one (Jungle) as a simple training exercise to get familiar with the level editing tools,” Vince tells me. “Over time I thought it would be really awesome if I could remake the entire game, but realized pretty quickly that something of that scale wouldn’t be possible for me given the amount of free time I had.”
Wisely, Vince took to popular video game discussion forum NeoGAF to see if anyone else would be interested in contributing to the project. “I thought it was a stretch, but before the second page I already had enough people interested to get started.” Vince and his collaborators all took one level each and set about the task of individually recreating a game level by level in order to create a complete depiction of the original title.
“The hardest part when it came to coordinating our efforts was to make sure we all finished in time and to keep some consistency with the art direction,” Vince says. Enemies and powerups that were common to more than one level were shared amongst the team to aid this, but for the most part people were left to their own devices to make their level their own — whilst still being true to the original. The finished product of eight stages by seven authors is about as close to the heart and soul of LittleBigPlanet as you can get; a nod to video games of the past and an example of how creation and collaboration can change the way that we play video games in today’s hyper-connected world.
“The hardest segment to build in my level was the boss, by far. I ended up making the boss sequence much more complex than I had originally intended, and for a while I definitely thought I had bit off more than I could chew,” Vince tells me. “Looking back it amazes me that I managed to make it work.” The whole project, frankly, is rather amazing in that it came together in the end. This sort of collaboration can soon fall apart if one person doesn’t hold up their end but, thankfully, the people that Vince worked with all had the same intention to ‘make it work’ and the drive to get it done—and he’s well aware of that fact.
“I would like to thank everyone who contributed to the project which was the reason it was so successful,” he says. “Everyone worked for free so I was not only grateful for their willingness and enthusiasm to participate, but the end result as well. I never imagined the project getting the attention it received back then, and it was due to all of our combined efforts that made it possible.” Whilst it’s Vince that I’m speaking to on the grounds that he set the project in motion, he makes it very clear to me that LittleBigContra was a team effort, with every single contributor deserving their praise for the project.
“Currently, Vince works as a player experience agent, a job that he describes as ‘technically’ within the video games industry — but he would love to continue pursuing his creative side if given the chance. “It would be extremely fulfilling to create games or work on level design,” he tells me. “I certainly think I have what it takes, but it’s tough to make it in the industry.”
And how will Vince change the industry once he’s well and truly ‘in’? More level editors. “I would also like to take this chance to encourage other developers to release level editors with their games,” Vince says. “Even if the editor itself isn’t a primary focus of the game, giving fans tools to create and contribute to the longevity of your game is a powerful asset.”