Team Asobi’s Nicolas Doucet on creating PlayStation 5’s next big game – and, he hopes, its next big mascot
It’s the PlayStation 5’s next big game, and Sony is in its DNA – but nonetheless there’s something very Nintendo about Astro Bot. It’s in the way that the game is designed so perfectly around the controller that you play with, taking advantage of all the DualSense controller’s bells and whistles. The spacey aesthetic, where different planets represent different colourful worlds to jump into, recalls Super Mario Galaxy. And there’s also the sense of pure joy that you feel when you play it. On a console whose most famous hits are rather self-serious – think God of War and The Last of Us – Astro Bot prioritises playfulness.
“I think Sony has the mindset of coolness in its product design, but there is also playfulness,” says Nicolas Doucet, the studio director at Team Asobi, the Japanese studio behind Astro Bot. “They’re not mutually exclusive, or seen as antagonistic… The [PlayStation] hardware team really liked it, nobody was being precious. These are products that are highly crafted, so you could imagine their designers wouldn’t want them to be tampered with – and there we were sticking eyes on a PSVR and turning it into a mothership.”
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