Sony's Japan Studio was responsible for many of PlayStation's most beloved cult favorites, including the likes of Shadow of the Colossus, Gravity Rush, Ape Escape, and LocoRoco. The studio was dissolved in 2021, and while its spirit lives on in Astro Bot developer Team Asobi, the gaming world remains a bit darker with the loss of that creative spark – and a newly unearthed pitch for a PSP game called Stamp has me mourning Japan Studio all over again.
Pitch materials for Stamp dated to November 2009 were recently uploaded to the Internet Archive courtesy of the preservationists at Obscure Gamers. The game never got made, but Japan Studio got at least as far as building a prototype to provide the footage for the trailer you see below.
Stamp would've been a 2D platformer with a papercraft aesthetic where you'd have a creative ability – a stamp – tied to each of the PSP's four face buttons. Square would create boxes you could chain together to create bridges or stairs. Circle would create a bouncy surface you could use to jump or reflect projectiles. You'd be able to kick triangles out to destroy bad guys. Finally, X would delete whatever stamps you'd previously thrown down.
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The player character would be part of the "Stamp Bug Family" – a roster of little ladybug-looking folks that each have special abilities, like dropping giant squares or creating floating circles to chain for midair mobility. These characters have a great deal of charm, and I'm utterly obsessed with a slide showcasing hero Stampie's family values by displaying him dragging a laptop-obsessed dalmatian – spotted with PlayStation icons, of course – out for a walk.
There's a lot of dry business details in here, projecting the game's potential sales versus marketing budget, but one key detail the devs cite in Stamp's favor is the success of other "kawaii taste" games, including PaRappa the Rapper, LittleBigPlanet, and Pokemon HeartGold/SoulSilver. Still, that wasn't enough to convince the bosses that Stamp needed to get made.
Stamp feels very much of a piece with Japan Studio's other beloved portable games, like Patapon and LocoRoco – simple, cute, full of creative ideas, and still some of the best PSP games ever made. Whether it would've been a similarly beloved classic is impossible to say, but this old pitch has me more than sold.
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