Latest Trailer Offers Exclusive Glimpse at Never-Released Sony PSP Title

Only a small fraction of developers’ ideas for games ever actually get made. Even ones that make it through the prototype stage often never see the light of day. A newly unearthed 2010 pitch for a Sony game from Japan Studio gives a tiny peak behind the curtain of how developers try to convince a publisher to greenlight their project.

New prototype materials for an unreleased Sony game, including a brief trailer and pitch deck, were recently shared by Obscure Games on YouTube and archive.org. Titled “Stamp,” the project aimed to be a 2D action platformer for the PlayStation Portable where PlayStation button symbols (square, triangle, circle, X) were used to navigate obstacles and create new structures in the environment.

Triangle would hurt enemies, circle would create bouncy objects, square would create platforms, and X would act as the delete button for objects. The story, meanwhile, revolved around a hero called Stampie rescuing his bug friends and family from the nasty oil bugs that had captured them. The game would also feature a multiplayer mode with co-op puzzles or battles where players tried to outlast one another.

“It’s like LocoRoco mixed with Freakyforms from 3DS,” remarked one fan on Reddit. “I love it and want it.”

But the PSP game obviously never came out. It presumably never got past certain internal review gates needed to greenlight the entire product. While it’s impossible to tell why that was from the prototype materials, the pitch deck shows the types of concerns that go into making that type of decision, at least for a small, first-party portable game back in 2010.

A production schedule estimates the time and costs to complete the game and localize it (roughly 12 months and $3 million). A business case section projects break-even points for unit sales and the expected return on investment at various levels of marketing spend. It also points to other “Kawaii taste” games on the market and their respective sales numbers to give a ballpark, including Pokémon Heart Gold and Soul Silver at 2.8 million copies and LittleBigPlanet at 2.5 million copies.

Much of the pitch deck is just charts showing how many copies the game would need to sell at various price points and marketing budgets in order to break even or exceed certain levels of return on investment. Apparently, the people making the call didn’t think the math panned out. The game itself seemed like a neat idea, though maybe too small stakes for where Sony’s first-party ambitions were going.

Japan Studio was ultimately shut down in 2021 and its remaining teams spun off into other divisions, including Team Asobi which produced last year’s imaginative hit Astro Bot. Still, Stamp is exactly the type of smaller whimsical experiment we don’t see as often from Sony these days, in part because it no longer has a gaming handheld to sell them on. Maybe that will change if the company ships the new portable gaming device it’s reportedly working on.

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