Little Big Planet & The Soundtrack of My Childhood

 

    When you ask most 2000s kids what game they grew up with, you get a variety of answers. Some classics are the LEGO videogames, Call of Duty, and Club Penguin. Some later Gen Z kids would even mention Minecraft or Fortnite when talking about their favorite videogames that they played as they grew up. And while I grew up with all of these games (minus COD, since I was raised in a very anti-violence house), one game I never see mentioned just happens to be one of my all-time favorites: LittleBigPlanet.

    The LittleBigPlanet franchise stretches across three main games, and they are all known for their community-created platformer games. While the story mode of these games were really fun, creative, and full of personality, they were not the main appeal of the game. What most people knew LittleBigPlanet for was the near infinite amount of player-made levels, which resulted in LBP feeling like less of a game, and more of a platform for people to explore their creativity and game-making skills. Player-made levels could be about pretty much anything, whether it be bombs raining down on a destructible environment, a money-making tycoon simulator, or gun games where you had to defeat wave after wave of zombies, monkeys, aliens, or robots. To stop myself from just rattling off more levels, I'll assume you get the picture of how varied and creative the games were.

    Sadly, all good things come to an end. As the years passed by and the player count dwindled, less and less levels were being made by the community, which had been whittled down to a small but passionate minority. While most kids grew out of the games and moved onto some of the titles I mentioned before, LittleBigPlanet was left abandoned, with tens of thousands of user-created levels sitting there, collecting dust. Finally, in early 2024, the game's servers were shut down, as it had become too expensive to maintain the servers for such a small community. And with that one action, sixteen years worth of memories, content, and hard work was gone, never to be recovered. With no existing backups of these levels, the community was wiped off of the face of the internet, much to my disappointment.

    Fast forwarding to the present, I had suddenly gotten a song recommended to me on my YouTube page. I hadn't thought about LittleBigPlanet in quite some time, but the second that the first few seconds of this song came on, I felt like I was eight years old again, sitting on the corner of my couch next to my sister as she sat on the carpet in front of the TV, completely consumed by the game on the screen. I've always felt a strong emotional connection to music, even though I was never any good at playing any instruments or reading sheet music. And I think that moments like these are good examples of why: music just has a special ability of taking you back to a specific moment in time, remembering details and feelings you forgot you experienced. This set me on a journey, going through the old soundtrack and appreciating what I once had.

    The next song I relived was this one, where I recall being chased by a massive robotic turkey (LBP was a weird game) as I leapt from building to building, jumping over pits of fire. Looking back on it, the Turkey moved pathetically slowly, but the music and being young made me feel so frantic that it felt like it was always right behind you. The calm, soothing music of the lobby music, where it felt like I spent hours of my life as my friends and I would customize our characters meticulously, or argue about which level to play, brings back so many memories.

    As much as I liked reliving childhood memories through these songs, the nostalgia isn't my favorite part of the little trip down memory lane I took. It's the comment section of these videos. Without fail, every single one of the songs posted on YouTube is filled with comments under the video, sharing similar experiences from their youth, appreciating the music, or just enjoying the nostalgia trip in bliss. Even though I never met anyone in person who played LBP as well, there was a sort of comfort in actually being able to read so many similar experiences to my own, to know that I was a part of a beautiful community, and even though we all grew up, we never forgot the days where we would sit on a couch with friends and family to play LBP on our Playstations.