The face of PlayStation: Shuhei Yoshida on the joy and future of video games
I n early 1993, Shuhei Yoshida joined Sony’s nascent PlayStation division as a business development guy – the first member of the team who didn’t have an engineering background. When he was working with Ken Kutaragi and the other architects of the original PlayStation, and later producing games from Crash Bandicoot and Gran Turismo alongside game development legends Mark Cerny and Kazunori Yamauchi, he freely admits that he could scarcely believe his luck. When I speak to him, on the eve of receiving Bafta’s prestigious fellowship award for his contribution to video games, he still seems endearingly surprised by his own success.
“The people who have received [this award] before are all creators! Amazing, talented, genius people! I don’t know how I fit in,” he says. (Previous recipients of the award include Shigeru Miyamoto and Hideo Kojima.) “But everybody says I deserve it, so I guess I deserve it.”
Yoshida is a recognisable face not just for people working in games – he has been a champion of game development for decades, as president of Sony’s game studios from 2008-2019, and has helped hundreds of developers get their games on to PlayStation – but to fans, as well. When the PlayStation 4 was the world’s most popular console, he was a regular face in Sony’s marketing and communications, gently poking fun at the rival Xbox One console or appearing on video game podcasts to discuss games he’d been enjoying.
At 59, he still plays everything, from Sony’s own blockbusters such as God of War and Horizon to independent games from little-known developers; currently he’s got a big Marvel Snap habit going, he tells me, but he’s also been playing the Bafta-winning Before Your Eyes on the recently released PlayStation VR2 headset
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