Mark was very widely quoted when he spoke negatively about LBP’s controls. How did you feel about that, and as it something you’re addressing?

Mark was quoted a little bit out of context. None of us are happy with the game, I think that’s the bottom line. What he was saying was, sometimes it annoys him but on the whole it’s pretty good. I think we can improve certain things. Any game designer will go ‘argh, that’s horrible, that bit’s disgusting!’ straight after it’s finished. It’s very flattering that people in the games press are mentioning LBP in the same breath as GTA IV and Fable II, but I remind them that this is the first game in a franchise. We’re here to iterate, we’re here to do sequels… no sequels is the wrong word… we’re here to spend the next three years building on LBP, so we’ll take it in which ever direction that makes it better. So what’s LBP 4 going to be like? Well, I don’t know. That’s where Mark is coming from – none of us feel like we’re done. In the interviews I’m doing now, people are asking me, am I on vacation now? Well, no, actually I’m coding as hard now as I was a month ago!

Are you coding DLC or a sequel?
Well, that’s the thing – we’re really fluid about it. I don’t know. I want to have the effort of a sequel, but I can’t say that we’ll do it as LBP2 or as DLC. I want to go on enjoying the creative process of making the game; how it ships is a question for later. The whole team is still cranking away, improving the game. What you see in the shops is a minimum of two or three months behind what the designers are working on – we haven’t stopped! So it’s really exciting, because how that content comes out, I can’t honestly say.

Sony has completely embraced the game and made it an intrinsic element of the PS3 message. Is that intimidating?
It’s a double-edged sword. Someone asked me, at what point did LBP change from a small-scale game to a big game, and my answer is, we didn’t quit the jobs that we loved to do a small game. What we didn’t know was whether Sony would get behind it. The reason we went with PS3 specifically was because, when we pitched to Sony they just got it – the 45 minute pitch actually took two hours and we were having this fantastic conversation about blue sky ideas, and I thought, this company really understands that they need a game like this and they seem to be willing to engage and discuss. Phil Harrison was incredible. And then going forward, the external development team that was assigned to us – these two Liverpudlians who keep us on the straight and narrow. I describe it as, they have really good taste. The traditional line for developers is, ‘oh publishers, creative control, blah blah’, and maybe that’s true in some cases, but with Pete and Leo, we treat them as a sounding board – and they respect that sometimes we ignore them. But we do also listen to them and it’s been a really interesting thing – I don’t know whether it’s luck, or quality, or timing, but Sony has got behind it and taken risks with us and it’s paid off on both sides…