The New Face Of PlayStation And The Technomagic Behind Astro Bot
Is Astro, the star of Astro’s Playroom and Astro Bot, a Sony mascot? Nicolas Doucet isn’t so sure. While the soft-spoken head of Team Asobi recognizes that the plucky little robot has the makings of a marquee character, and while it’s become the face of the studio and even graces its logo, he also doesn’t think it’s his or the studio’s place to say. To hear him tell it, a mascot is grown organically out of affection from fans, not a status assigned by corporate masters. On a recent trip to Team Asobi’s studio in Japan, we got an up-close look at how Astro came to be and the design philosophy that drives the studio’s playful, polished little automaton.
Birth of a Baby Robot
It wasn’t long ago that Team Asobi’s work wasn’t meant to be seen directly by consumers at all. It was an internal R&D studio under the umbrella of Sony’s Japan Studio, composed mostly of ex-developers, and devoted to developing tools and techniques for other Sony studios. It didn’t have any grand ambitions to break into game development, but in hindsight, Doucet said the turn toward public development was probably inevitable.
“We were asked to put some of our tech demos, at the time it was PlayStation 4, into the console and that’s when we had to go back into making games,” Doucet said. “But I think honestly over time, probably we would’ve felt the same way, because we were all ex-game developers. There were people who came from projects such as Gravity Rush at the time, and I think sooner or later we would’ve wanted to go back into making full-on games, I’d imagine. So that was a request, but it’s a good one.”