The 15 Deepest Cuts in Astro Bot and Where They Came From

Astrobotreleased for PlayStation 5 on September 6, is a great platform game. It also marks the beginning of Sony’s celebration 30 years of PlayStation (The original console debuted in Japan in December 1994.) The game is rife with PlayStation Easter eggs and fanservice.

In particular, of the game’s 300 collectible bots, no fewer than 173 are dressed up as characters from the last three decades of PlayStation games. But developer Team Asobi shamelessly doesn’t name them directly, giving each one a clue-like codename (“Aristocratic Archaeologist” for Lara Croft, “Raider Dude” for Nathan Drake) and a further description full of clues. So browsing through the collection is as much a guessing game as it is a test of how deep your PlayStation fascination runs.

Many of the bots are instantly recognizable. But some are pretty concealed. While the third-party heroes are all fairly familiar (Ryu, Ken, Solid Snake), Team Asobi has dug deep into Sony’s history as a games publisher, uncovering some weird and wonderful delights. Particularly in the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 era, Sony was a publisher with deep pockets and no fear of throwing all sorts of weird ideas at the wall to see what would catch on, especially in the Japanese market.

AstrobotThe bot collection is a pretty tribute to that era and Team Asobi’s former home, Japan Studio—the legendary, groundbreaking Sony studio that was disbanded in 2021. Here are some of the deepest cuts from the collection.

(Thanks to my colleagues at Polygon — especially Nicole Carpenter and Michael McWhertor — for helping me identify some of these, and to Ryan Gilliam for providing photos of his entire bot collection!)

It is no wonder that many of the deepest cuts in Astrobot hail from the PS1 era, but here’s a PlayStation 3 game that was sadly forgotten a little over a decade ago: a game from 2013. Puppeteer. That little guy is Kutaro, a boy turned puppet who can swap heads and slash scenery with scissors in a modern gameplay mechanic. Japan Studio’s game was original but didn’t find much of an audience—which was starting to become a problem for Sony in the higher-stakes world of the PS3 era. Its failure signaled the beginning of the end for the studio.

This creepy, angular purple head is called Polygonal Man and, believe it or not, briefly served as the marketing mascot for the original PlayStation in North America. Polygon Man, intended to be a bold spokesman aimed at teenagers who might be put off by the PlayStation’s toy name, was considered a mistake by almost everyone, including PlayStation boss Ken Kutaragi, and was abandoned before the PS1 launched.

Dark Chroniclea 2003 PS2 RPG game published by Level-5 as Dark Cloud 2 in North America isn’t as concealed as some of the other references on this list, but the way this bot is named and presented makes its identity particularly arduous to guess. This is Dark ChronicleThe game’s protagonist Maximilian, also known as Max, is thinking about toy houses, as the game has a built-in city-building mechanic, as well as random dungeons inherited from its spiritual predecessor Dark cloud.

Boku no Natsuyasumi (usually translated as My summer vacation) is a Japan-exclusive, nostalgic open-world life simulation series about being a kid on summer vacation in 1975. This bug-catching boy is the main character, Boku. In the first game, released for the PlayStation in 2000, and its three sequels, there are no goals as such; beyond daily activities, it’s up to you how Boku spends his 31 days of free time in the countryside. Natsu-Mon: The 20th Century Summer Kida spiritual sequel from director Kaz Ayabe’s original, it was recently released for Nintendo Switch and Windows PC.

One of the most extraordinary games ever released on PS1 – and that’s saying a lot – is Vib Ribbon. It was an ultra-minimalist, black-and-white take on the then-popular rhythm game genre, in which a creaky, line-drawn rabbit named Vibri bounded along a single line, overcoming abstract hazards to the beat of upbeat electro music. The innovation was that you could insert your own music CDs into the PlayStation and have the game generate levels that matched the tune.

Unusual mini-game compilations were common on the original PlayStation; does anyone remember I owe him a special debt.? One of the most unusual was Incredible crisiswhich follows four members of a working-class Japanese family who try to get home for their grandmother’s birthday despite all sorts of horrifying and incoherent events—bank robberies, statues crashing into offices, kaiju teddy bears, everything—without putting a dent in their stress meters. That guy is the dad, Taneo.

The sheep with the axe is Lammy, the heroine Well, Jammer Lammya rock spin-off of the more renowned rap rhythm game PaRappa Rapper (also occurs in Astrobot). Although it doesn’t have the lyrical charm of PaRappa, Well, Jammer Lammy goes incredibly robust musically, conceptually, and in its crazy gameplay.

This elven adventurer is Alundrastar of the 1998 PS1 game of the same name. Developed by Matrix Software and published in Japan by Sony itself, it was an attempt to give the PlayStation a Legend of Zelda-style fantasy adventure, with the intriguing gimmick that Alundra could enter the dreams of locals. However, its old-school 2D gameplay was completely overshadowed by Zelda’s move to 3D with Ocarina of Time the same year, and is now largely forgotten.

This idiot is a reference to Intelligent Qubea 1997 Sony PS1 puzzle game in which a minuscule man runs around platforms trying not to get crushed by monolithic metal cubes. There’s something eerie and overwhelming about a delicate man running through this hostile, monochromatic void, at the mercy of basic polygonal slabs, that could only have been invented in the crazy early days of 3D gaming.

This guy is Arc, the hero of the tactical RPG game Arc Boyreleased only in Japan for the PS1 in 1995. The game was popular enough to spawn several sequels well into the PS2 era, as well as a manga and anime. However, the first three games were never released in the West, more or less dooming it to obscurity on these shores.

Before Sony allowed him to define racing games for an entire generation with his ultra-realistic motorsport magnum opus Big tourismKazunori Yamauchi was asked to get his chops by knocking out a Mario Kart clone at Japan Studio. This game dates back to 1994 Motor Grand Prix (Japan-only release, though a sequel was released in the US.) Of course, Yamauchi went all out, building in complicated handling physics with fully simulated suspensions for the cartoon karts.

You could be forgiven for being surprised by this strange glowing dog character, even though it’s from a very recent release. It’s a player character Humanitya 2023 puzzle platformer/art piece where your heavenly dog ​​guides huge crowds of people through treacherous, abstract levels (which are somewhat reminiscent of Intelligent QubeActually).

This adorable little Pomeranian is actually the cover star of an extremely brutal PS3-era indie game developed by Crispy’s! and developed by Japan Studio: Tokyo Jungle. The 2012 game is about survival of the fittest in a ruined Tokyo with no human inhabitants — just animals eating each other, fucking each other, and evolving. The Pomeranian is one of two starting animals (the other is a deer; surviving as a herbivore is even harder).

Every once in a while you come across a game whose title requires no explanation, and an example of this is the 2002 PS2 release Mr. Mosquitoin which… you play as a mosquito. You live in a house with a family of human-sized people and you have to suck their blood to survive. That’s it. It’s a game.

Meet Robbit, the robotic rabbit, the main character of a very early PlayStation version Jumping Flash!game released in 1995 for consoles in Europe and North America. Jumping Flash! was a bold, surprising attempt at creating a 3D platform game using a first-person perspective. Super Mario 64 A year later, this approach was consigned to history, but the game was still a true pioneer.