If PlayStation’s next big character succeeds, it will be in part because he is a really, really cute little guy.
Astro, the babylike robot at the center of the new video game Astro Bot, has charmed his way from an asset in a technology demonstration for Sony to leading one of the best-reviewed titles of the year.
Establishing a video game mascot requires a particular alchemy of elegance and identity. Succeed and land among Nintendo heavyweights like Mario and Kirby. Fail and, well, even Bubsy has a Wikipedia page.
Nicolas Doucet, the creative director of Team Asobi, which developed Astro Bot, used his hands during a video interview to emphasize how Astro’s large, expressive blue eyes and compact physicality were vital to his appeal.
“I think part of it is the simplicity of the design,” Doucet said. “We’ve kept things simple on purpose.”
Doucet said Astro’s current look came from the technical limitations of hardware in 2013, when the robot was introduced in The Playroom, an augmented reality tech demo for the PlayStation 4 that saw a bevy of bots swarm players in the “real” world.
A 2016 follow-up did the same with The Playroom VR, a version of the earlier demo but for the company’s virtual reality headset. Then came Astro Bot: Rescue Mission, in 2018, a well-received early title on the PlayStation VR, but one that is not available to play on the current generation of the hardware. In 2020, Astro arrived with Astro’s Playroom, a preinstalled title on PlayStation 5 that also served as a tech demo for the DualSense controller’s capabilities, including delicate haptic feedback rumbling and granular trigger sensitivity.
But after several cameos, Astro Bot is the character’s biggest opportunity to assert his identity in the canon of video game mascots. Astro’s lack of lore as he heads into his first real adventure is a benefit, Doucet said.
“On purpose we’re not growing a backstory that is very, very precise so that, as a character, you can continue being flexible,” he said. “We can take Astro wherever we want.”
Strangely enough, his less-than-glamorous origin story makes him a strong fit for that canon. Kirby, the beloved character who is simply a pink circle with a face, arms and feet, started his life as placeholder art.
Katherine Isbister, a professor of human computer interaction at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of “How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design,” said Astro’s uncomplicated origins were a strength. There is no temptation to deviate from the simple appeal of his design.
“If you consciously try to design the ideal cute character, you can wash away all the uniqueness out with careful market testing,” she said. “But something someone sketches that’s appealing, that’s kind of bubbling up from their subconscious, it can clear those design-by-committee gates.”
Astro’s design strength, Isbister said, is that though he is a robot, he is also a baby. If his huge head and little body do not fully cement that impression, Astro walks around the game world with a full toddler waddle as he recovers the missing parts of his spaceship, collects coins and jumps on trampolines decorated with his face. The DualSense controller uses vibration technology for players to feel every tippy-tap.
“If something looks like a baby, we’re sort of hard-wired to think it’s cute and want to take care of it,” Isbister said.
PlayStation titles are not typically identified with their cuter protagonists (apologies to Sackboy, a previous cute mascot from the LittleBigPlanet franchise that is no longer a representative for the company). Gamers are primed instead to think of the pithy treasure hunter Nathan Drake from Uncharted, the postapocalyptic found family Joel and Ellie from The Last of Us and, well, a god of war from God of War.
Those characters are all so defined that the player is locked within a set personality, Isbister said. But every player can identify with a character like Astro.
“Something that’s really photorealistic, that’s hyperdetailed feels more like an ‘other’ person to us, where something like this character that’s very simple allows projection of the self,” she said.
Astro’s universality goes beyond his looks. Doucet said the robot’s sound effects, his chirps and squeals as he hops around, were designed so a child could easily replicate them.
Whether Astro will become a legacy character remains to be seen, but he has made an early impression on children, with fan art making its way to Doucet after Astro’s Playroom. Before Astro Bot was released, Doucet said, he heard from the parents of two young Brazilian girls who could not wait for the game.
“That’s the real fuel,” he said. “That’s what makes us feel good.”