Edge:
Phil Harrison has witnessed the PlayStation’s evolution since the very beginning. Having joined Sony in 1993 as product development director, he immediately went underground to start the console’s European development and support group, working closely with the Tokyo R&D team, which was completing the hardware and OS design. One of his key objectives was to spread the PlayStation message to the development community in Europe, as well as to hire talented technical support staff and software engineers (to whom Harrison refers as the ‘unsung heroes’ of the European division). Now, as communications director, he is heavily involved with the European marketing strategy for the machine. Edge spoke to him at SCEE’s London HQ.
Phil Harrison discusses the future of gaming and how Stadia's cloud-based service aims to be a big part of it.
In this month's IGN Unfiltered interview, Phil Harrison revealed a big reason why the PlayStation 3 released a year after the Xbox 360.
I’m glad Sony didn’t rush PlayStation 3’s launch. Microsoft did so for Xbox 360 just to get an advantage over the competition and their console had one of the worse hardware malfunctions in history. Scratched discs, overheating and RRoDs out the wazoo. Add that to the no HDMI out of the box on launch units, no WiFi & myriad of other cost cutting decisions showed Microsoft cheaped out on so many things just for that headstart.
Another interesting reason for the delay was that the first batch of chips which Sony funded and ordered were defective, where as Microsoft bought backups from a 3rd party. So Microsoft got chips Sony funded even before Sony did, as Sony didn't consider the chance of Microsoft asking IBM for a chip, with IBM showing them what they were working on for Sony
Neither company had great luck during RnD last gen
- PS2 launches ahead of Xbox: PlayStation outsells it
- Xbox 360 launches ahead of PS3: PlayStation outsells it
- PS4 launches alongside Xbox One: PlayStation outsells it
Seems no matter what timeframe Microsoft releases their console they’ll still have less marketshare than Sony.
Even if PS5 were somehow delayed a year behind the next Xbox, I’m certain it’d still outsell it just like PS3 did to 360. Unfortunately for Microsoft the PS5 will release alongside the next Xbox.
And still against all odds the PS3 surpassed Xbox 360. Xbox has finished last in each of their console generations.
PS3 launch was a fail. $599! Riiiidge Racer! Backlash!
Xbox One launch was a fail! The system will always be online. Backlash!
If these two consoles are taking turns on launch fails. PS5 launch will be a fail.
Oh no!
Creative engineers Phil Harrison, Jade Raymond, Majd Bakar, and more take you behind the scenes of Google Stadia
It's crazy looking back at the evolution of the PS brand. I'm lucky to have experienced them all. I got the PS1 Christmas of 97; my first games was Castlevania SOTN. Good times good times.
Look, he had hair!
"Do you think that Japanese companies have irreversibly taken over as the world leaders of videogame design?"
"If anything negative could be levelled at Sony so far, it’s that it still hasn’t proved it can develop a world-class videogame. What is SCE doing to rectify this problem?"
Ah how things have changed.
Agent Phil has been doing an outstanding job over at Microsoft in the last year