Shuhei Yoshida will retire from Sony Interactive Entertainment on January 15 next year.
Yoshida has held numerous leadership positions at PlayStation since joining the team in 1993. His initial role involved working with publishers and developers in Japan to help them create titles for the first PlayStation console.
He is probably best known for his time as president of Worldwide Studios, where he led PlayStation’s first-party development for over a decade between 2008 and 2019. Since 2019, he has led PlayStation’s relationship with independent studios as head of PlayStation Indies.
Speaking to the official PlayStation podcast, Yoshida recounted his early years as part of Ken Kutaragi’s initial PlayStation team.
“I joined Ken Kutanagi’s team in February 1993, when they were still developing the original PlayStation. Ken’s team had only engineers. They were all engineers. And I was the first non-technical person to join the team as a company, Sony Corporation at At that time, I began planning to bring PlayStation to the market.”
He continued: “We were very excited about the innovation that Ken’s team was incorporating, such as 3D graphics, real-time technology and CD-ROMs with a large amount of data that we can incorporate with a low manufacturing cost. And so we had great hopes and ambitions.
“However, we weren’t known in the video game industry. And there were other electronics companies, big companies that tried to get into the video game industry and, you know, they didn’t do well. So in the beginning, before the launch from PlayStation “I think the industry didn’t take us very seriously, to be honest.”
He describes his current job working with indies as his “dream job.” And his best memory is when one of those little games, Journey, was named game of the Year at the DICE summit in 2013.
“The entire audience stood up and the whole room was filled with happiness and an incredible feeling that this little game could have such a big impact on people’s lives,” he said.
GameIndustry.biz He last spoke with Shuhei Yoshida in 2023 before receiving his BAFTA Fellowship award. You can read it here.
