A Frenchman in the video game firmament: Nicolas Doucet and his game “Astro Bot”, a tribute to the flagship heroes of PlayStation consoles, won the title of game of the year on Thursday evening during the Game Awards 2024.
“Nothing can prepare you for this,” said the director of the Japanese studio Team Asobi, owned by Sony, on the stage of the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles, brandishing the most coveted statuette of the annual ceremony honoring the video game industry.
The 46-year-old Frenchman with an atypical background also paid tribute – without mentioning it – to the competing video game giant Nintendo.
“I remember as a child, at Christmas 1989, I received a gray box in which was a game called “Super Mario Bros.”, a brilliant game,” he slipped on stage, while “ Astro Bot” recalls the heyday of the mustachioed plumber's adventures.
“The love of Japan has always been an important vector in my life,” he confided to AFP last August, in a large open space at the Tokyo headquarters of Sony Interactive Entertainment.
His team spent more than three years on this “Astro Bot”, released in August, which features new adventures of his little robot.
Sold more than 1.5 million copies and exclusive to the PS5, the game earned the highest score of the year on the review aggregator site Metacritic, with 94 out of 100, tied with “Metaphor : ReFantazio” and “Elden Ring: Shadows of the Erdtree”.
– “Child’s dream” –
Originally from Aignan, “a small village” in Gers, in the heart of the Armagnac vineyards (south-west), he says he was immersed very early in Japanese pop culture, like many others from “this generation of French people who grew up with the Dorothée Club.
There was a gamer in the village who imported his consoles and who infected us all. We were 14 years old, we played games all in Japanese, we didn't understand anything, but we had them for one or two years. “It crystallized in us this love of Japan,” he says.
Initially wanting to become an English teacher, he went into exile in London where he fell by chance into the world of video games, working at Eidos, Electronic Arts and Lego, then at Sony to work with the EyeToy, a camera allowing play using motion recognition.
“I have always been immersed in the super accessible toy game where people have fun,” he slips. Then, in the early 2010s, he asked to join Sony's Japanese headquarters, “a childhood dream that came true.”
His team was first tasked with exploring fun applications of various technologies and created “Astro Bot Rescue Mission” for the PlayStation VR virtual reality headset.
At the end of 2020, the PlayStation 5 was released, on which “Astro's PlayRoom” was pre-installed, designed to fully exploit the capabilities of its controller.
– “Magic” –
“Astro Bot” is intended to be an extension of these first adventures, at higher speed: without respite, Astro runs, flies, swims, skates, climbs, drills, wrings itself like a sponge or transforms into a mouse through fifty of sweet-hued planets.
The game puts technology at the service of immersion with the “haptic feedback” present in the controller, a technology also used in smartphones, allowing the player to “feel” if the character is walking in the grass, on a path rocky or metal surface.
The word “magic” constantly comes up in the creator's mouth when he presents the universe that takes Astro from planet to planet: “it comes from the games I grew up with”, smiles Nicolas Doucet.
“Making a platform game in Japan really makes sense, because it’s a country where historically the quality and precision of the controls has always been at the top, in arcade or fighting games for example.”
“I have enormous respect for the members of the team who have this in their blood,” he confides. “Sometimes I say to myself 'but you're really lucky to be able to do this'.”
