The rise of Sackboy, the mascot PlayStation has been searching for

When 2012 is all said and done Sony will have released three games starring Sackboy, the nondescript hessian bag of fluff and ice cream who made his name in Media Molecule’s ground-breaking create-your-own platformer LittleBigPlanet.

One of these, LittleBigPlanet Vita, has already launched and wowed critics. LittleBigPlanet Karting is out today and PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale releases later this year.

Sackboy’s star has risen almost unnoticed, but given LBP’s continued success perhaps it comes as no surprise. An impressive 8.5 million LBP games have been sold thus far (not taking into account LBP Vita). That’s across the three games in the series: LBP, LBP PSP and LBP2. Sony is proud of its 91 per cent Metacritic average across those three games, but it is delighted by the community’s seemingly never-ending appetite for user-generated content: over seven million levels have been created on PS3 – or 35,000 per week.

Other publishers have taken notice. You know all those costumes for Sackboy that dress him up as other franchise’s characters? Cloud Strife and all the rest? Well, there have been over 30 video game licenses in LBP, with over 60 million downloads of DLC. There are over 300 DLC costumes on the PS Store. The message is clear: LBP is a big success and a lot of that has to do with Sackboy’s increasing appeal.

This year Sackboy levelled up. He went from being the blank canvass we customise to a recognisable face in his own right. With the PlayStation 3 nearly seven years old and cheaper than ever, Sony is desperate to attract a more family friendly audience to the console. Who better to front that campaign than Sackboy and his beaming smile?

“This year more than any other year previously, Sackboy has escalated in terms of being a PlayStation icon,” Tom O’Connor, senior producer at Sony XDEV (the Liverpool-based division responsible for external development and the management of the LBP franchise) tells me a Sony preview event in London for the LBP family. We’re sitting next to LBP2 and a Vita. Tom’s showing off the new update that means you can use a Vita to control the PS3 game. In the room next door is LBP Karting and a bank of Vitas with the new game running on them.