Finally, some seven years after it first broke cover at 2013’s PlayStation Meeting as it accompanied the unveiling of the PlayStation 4, Media Molecule’s Dreams is here, its long and winding road concluding towards the tail-end of that particular console’s life. Except it’s not the end of Dreams, of course – it’s the beginning of a project that will transform over time according to the community’s needs and wants.
Talking about Dreams can be confusing like that, probably because we keep making the mistake of treating it like a regular video game. The more time you spend with it, though, the more you realise it isn’t that at all – it’s a whole new platform, a place to create and share and a dazzling toolkit that’s already been put to fantastic use.
I’m still not entirely sure what it is, but I do know that the more time I spend with it the more I love it. I got the chance to sit down with Media Molecule’s Alex Evans and Mark Healey as they celebrated the launch to talk about what’s taken them so long, what’s changed along the way and where they think Dreams might be heading.
So last time I met you was at the PlayStation experience five years ago – and I think we all thought the game was imminent then.
Alex Evans: Yeah, it was. I mean, it was one of those funny things where we had made a thing where you could make beautiful stuff, but it was really painful, not very fun to make stuff with and we could take the pain of using it every day, but it wasn’t what we wanted it to be. And, you know, Sony gave us the rope to try again. Basically, I joked that this is Dreams 2. But we’ve taken the time to make the thing we wanted it to be.
Did you have to go back and start from scratch?
Alex Evans: I mean, not from scratch – I think every game maker will tell you this, you go through a process of searching for what it is that makes your idea work again, same idea, same plan, but then you’re like, ‘Oh, this is rubbish, this particular path we’ve gone down’. You do have to backtrack sometimes – we took a big backward step. We looked at what we had, and I’m so glad we did it because I look back at those old videos and I’m like, the content was cool. The levels we were making were beautiful and everything but the process of creation wasn’t good enough for the community to flourish.
Dreams reveal trailer – E3 2015 Sony Conference – Media Molecule’s next game Watch on YouTube
To my eyes it doesn’t look that different to what I saw back in 2015 – I thought it looked great back then!
Alex Evans: A lot of it’s about making it easier. We put a lot of effort into stuff like tutorials – which sounds very boring and schooly, but the tools are actually kind of funny. There’s a joke that the last 10% takes 90% of the time – and it was that, it was making it good, fun and easy. And that’s what we focused on. I’m going to maybe probably butcher this because I’m not exactly sure what he said – I didn’t read the original quote – but there was the bloke who made this sort of Wipeout clone, and it went viral and Kotaku picked it up. And someone asked him why didn’t you use Unity? Why don’t you just use Unreal? And he said, because I had no idea that I was going to make this game. I didn’t have a plan. I’m not a game maker. I didn’t even think of myself as someone who’s going to go and make this particular game that’s going to go viral. I just had fun making a thing. And it sort of blossomed and turned into this. And that’s Dreams for me. That was a really nice little parable, and I’m proud Dreams can let someone just be doodling and then for it to flourish rather than someone saying I will be the next Mike Bithell, I’ll be the next indie sensation. You can do that too hopefully.
I wanted to talk about that, because you’ve talked about people self-publishing before.
Alex Evans: Yeah Mark likes to mention that [see sidebar], and it makes people from Sony clench.
But it’s an interesting point – I wanted to ask you about how people can self-publish but I’m slowly realising maybe that’s not the point. I make music in my spare time but I never want anyone to hear it. It doesn’t have to be about financial gain or getting recognition.