Shuhei Yoshida will retire from Sony Interactive Entertainment on January 15 next year.
Yoshida has held numerous leadership roles at PlayStation since he joined 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’s probably best known for his time as president of Worldwide Studios, leading PlayStation’s first-party development for over a decade between 2008 and 2019. Since 2019, he has led PlayStation’s relationship with indie studios as the 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 of 1993, when they were still developing the original PlayStation. Ken’s team had only engineers. Everyone was engineers. And I was the first non-technical person to join the team as the company, Sony Corporation at the time, started to plan to bring PlayStation to market.”
He continued: “We were so excited about the innovation that Ken’s team was bringing in, like 3D graphics, real-time technology, and CD-ROM with lots of data that we can put in with a low cost of manufacturing. And so we had really high hopes, high ambitions.
“However, we were not known in the video game industry. And there were other electronics companies, big companies that tried to enter the video game industry and, you know, didn’t do well. So at the beginning before the launch of PlayStation, I think we were not taken very seriously from the industry, to be honest.”
He describes his current job of working with indies as his “dream job”. And his fondest memory was when one such small game, Journey, was named Game of the Year at the DICE summit in 2013.
“The whole audience stood up and the whole room was filled with happiness and an amazing feeling that this small game could have such a big impact on people’s lives,” he said.
GamesIndustry.biz last spoke with Shuhei Yoshida in 2023 ahead of his BAFTA Fellowship Award. You can read it here.