Hello everyone, we hope you are all doing well and staying healthy.
Today we have colorful news from Team Asobi, the Tokyo-based PlayStation studio responsible for the Astro Bot series.
After the release of Astro’s Playroom on PlayStation 5, Team Asobi is spreading its wings and growing! It’s a very exciting time for the team, and we look forward to this next chapter. We wanted to take this opportunity to thank all of you PlayStation fans for your kind words of support over the years, especially as Astro made its debut on PlayStation 5 alongside the DualSense wireless controller.
As we grow and challenge bigger things, our mission at heart remains the same: to bring you PlayStation magic, innovation and put smiles on your faces with fun and colorful games for all ages.
To accompany this news, we are proud to show our new logo that you will see in our future productions. We were inspired by what the Asobi team meant to us. Some of the alumni might recognize other influences from the early days of PlayStation as well!
To stay in touch, we are also launching our own social channels on Twitter and Instagram to keep you up to date with everything related to the Asobi team! Please follow them and feel free to engage with us. We have a million trivia to share about how our games are made, so come say hi!
And if you don’t know Team Asobi, let us tell you more about our origins.
The team was first put together in 2012, just over a year before the launch of the PS4. At the time, a handful of us were working on tech demos showing what the new hardware could do. We sat down one day and decided we needed a name for our team; something that would work as a reminder of what we thought was the most important part of any video game: great gameplay and that second-to-second fun it can provide!
In Japanese, the word “Asobu” literally means “Play” and so we opted for “Asobi”. Those five single letters was a surprisingly appropriate name with a great sound and it stuck!
Fast forward a few years, the team is still growing, we launched Astro Bot: Rescue Mission in 2018 and Astro’s Playroom for PS5 in 2020. And now Team Asobi has become the newest in-house studio in the PlayStation Studios family. Basically, our philosophy revolves around this joy par excellence in to play, whether it’s through pixel-perfect character controls, exploiting a surprisingly cool new controller, or wrapping humorous animations in every nook and cranny, that’s what we’re passionate about 🙂
So who are the Asobis then? Well, since we’re a PlayStation game development studio located in the cool and bustling Tokyo area, the majority of the team is Japanese. We also have several members from various other countries: England, Germany, France, Scotland, Korea, Europe and Colombia. It is important for us to have this mixed baggage to help us create universal games. And of course, we all share the same love for Japan: its craftsmanship, its pop culture, its gaming heritage but also its beautiful seasons, its wacky innovations (so much !!) and its delicious cuisine!
Technology has also been a determining factor for the Asobi team. Many Asobis have a true love affair with technology, but we also realize that technology itself is just the starting point. It then has to be transformed into something magical and awesome to be truly meaningful. In that regard, working with the DualSense controller lately has been a lot of fun and we continue to love experimenting with it right now. But shhh it’s a secret!
Finally, we take inspiration from video games designed and all members of the Asobi team are passionate gamers. We love all types of games, including, of course, platformers that deliver that second-to-second joy where every successful jump you make is a mini-story in itself.
That’s all about us today. Let’s face it, the past 18 months have been really tough for many people around the world and we sincerely hope that through the joy of to play, these difficult times were easier to bear. We send you all our best wishes for well-being. Thank you for being such a great community and we look forward to your feedback. See you soon !
