{"id":48607,"date":"2025-08-06T19:33:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-06T19:33:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/48607\/"},"modified":"2025-08-06T19:33:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-06T19:33:10","slug":"media-molecules-last-remaining-co-founder-resigns-after-nearly-20-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/48607\/","title":{"rendered":"Media Molecule&#8217;s Last Remaining Co-Founder Resigns After Nearly 20 Years"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"scanlines\" title=\"Media Molecule&#039;s Last Remaining Co-Founder Resigns After Nearly 20 Years 1\" href=\"https:\/\/images.pushsquare.com\/5013e3809f94c\/media-molecules-last-remaining-co-founder-resigns-after-nearly-20-years-1.large.jpg\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\"   src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/media-molecules-last-remaining-co-founder-resigns-after-nearly-20-years-1.900x.jpg\" width=\"900\" height=\"506\" alt=\"Media Molecule's Last Remaining Co-Founder Resigns After Nearly 20 Years 1\"\/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Media Molecule&#8217;s David Smith, the last co-founder still at the studio, has announced he&#8217;s leaving the company.<\/p>\n<p>The developer shared the news <a class=\"external\" href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/mediamolecule\/status\/1953093715926356276\" rel=\"nofollow\">on its socials<\/a> today, with a statement from Smith himself. He says he&#8217;s leaving Media Molecule to pursue &#8220;personal creative projects&#8221;. Here&#8217;s the full statement:<\/p>\n<p>20 years ago I founded Mm with some wonderful people. It feels like only yesterday that I was noodling away on the prototype that grew into <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pushsquare.com\/games\/ps3\/littlebigplanet\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">LittleBigPlanet<\/a>. Today I&#8217;m announcing that I am leaving Mm to focus on personal creative projects.<\/p>\n<p>Most of the Mm founders came from Lionhead, a chaotic petri dish of creativity, and I couldn&#8217;t have wished for a better training ground. Strongly influenced by that unconventional creativity, Mm was born of a restless yearning to make exciting new experiences that we deeply believe in. We love making games, and so we naturally wanted to share that joy of creativity with our players. I&#8217;m proud to say that of all the games we&#8217;ve made, and are making, the spirit of creativity and joyfulness suffuses them all. This has been an unregrettable use of those years.<\/p>\n<p>More recently, I&#8217;ve been feeling a growing itch to explore truly wild ideas and make things based on my personal whimsy. Though I still greatly enjoy the creative dynamic of working at Mm, there simply aren&#8217;t enough hours in the day to work at Mm and on my personal projects, without entirely giving up on pursuing that mythical creature called &#8220;work-life balance&#8221;. So I&#8217;ve made the difficult decision to step away from Mm.<\/p>\n<p>I hope to be involved with Mm in future, and to drop in from time to time. I greatly enjoy working with the team. It&#8217;s a very different bunch to what we had 20 years ago, but the positivity and free exchange of ideas remains true to the founding spirit of the company. I&#8217;m leaving the company in very good hands.<\/p>\n<p>Smith co-founded Media Molecule in January of 2006 alongside Mark Healey, Kareem Ettouney, and Alex Evans \u2014 all of whom have also moved on from the studio in the wake of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pushsquare.com\/games\/ps4\/dreams\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Dreams&#8217;<\/a> release.<\/p>\n<p>Siobhan Reddy, head of the studio, has been with the company almost as long as its founders, and will now be the longest-serving member of the team.<\/p>\n<p>We had the pleasure of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pushsquare.com\/news\/2020\/07\/interview_how_dreams_psvr_update_empowers_players_to_be_even_more_creative\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">interviewing Smith<\/a> around the time that PSVR support was added to Dreams, which you can read through the link.<\/p>\n<p>Media Molecule is currently <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pushsquare.com\/news\/2024\/05\/media-molecules-new-project-is-more-of-a-game-than-a-creative-tool-says-co-founder\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">working on a brand new IP<\/a>, but it&#8217;s still shrouded in mystery. Creative director John Beech, who spearheaded the excellent Dreams game <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pushsquare.com\/features\/tren-sends-media-molecules-dreams-out-in-style\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Tren<\/a>, will be leading the charge.<\/p>\n<p>What are your thoughts on this news? Discuss in the comments section below.<\/p>\n<p class=\"text source\">[source <a class=\"external\" title=\"External Link: https:\/\/x.com\/mediamolecule\/status\/1953093715926356276\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\" href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/mediamolecule\/status\/1953093715926356276\">x.com<\/a>]<\/p>\n<p class=\"avatar\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"img lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/1752780488_513_avatar.jpg\" width=\"80\" height=\"80\" loading=\"lazy\" alt=\"Stephen Tailby\"\/><\/p>\n<p>Stephen has been part of the Push Square team for over six years, bringing boundless enthusiasm and a deep knowledge of video games to his role as Assistant Editor. Having grown up playing every PlayStation console to date, he&#8217;s developed an eclectic taste, with particular passion for indie games, arcade racers, and puzzlers. He&#8217;s also our go-to guy for Sonic-related matters, much to his delight\/chagrin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Media Molecule&#8217;s David Smith, the last co-founder still at the studio, has announced he&#8217;s leaving the company. The&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48608,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[59,27107,197,112,622,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-48607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-gb","tag-media-molecule","tag-ps4","tag-ps5","tag-sony","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48607\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}