Interview with Sony's Phil Harrison

Interview with Sony's Phil Harrison

By Jacana and J.I.Syles

At AGDC this year, Jacana and J.I. Styles had the unique opportunity, thanks to Souri and Sony, to interview the Executive Vice President of Development for Sony Europe, Phil Harrison.

Phil is responsible for the 5 internal studios and the international network of external developers creating PlayStation® and PlayStation®2 products for SCEE. We managed to steal about twenty minutes of Phil's time on Friday and had quite a range of questions to ask. Phil had already been in Australia covering interviews and other business things" by the time we got our hands on him.

The first part of the interview was just to establish Phil's background and entrance into the games industry as well as establishing a bit of background as to what he's been up to at Sony.The second part of the interview covers questions about the games" for Eye Toy, PlayStation®2 online in Australia, as well as a few other areas of interest to Sony.The third part of the interview will be a post AGDC follow-up via email with Phil. While we were asked if we'd be interested in meeting up again later, we could both tell that Phil was very busy and felt that an email follow-up would suit Phil's time and sleep constraints much better.

Jacana: Where was your actual start?
Phil: I am probably not the poster child for how to get into this particular industry; but the way that I rooted in is quite unorthodox, and is certainly not one that I would recommend people follow - but I'll share with you anyway.

When I was about 14, [or] 15.....actually 13 was when I got a Commodore 64, and I just started playing around writing games, and like a lot of people in the community at that time or people in the games industry who started off at that time, their first bit of programming work was to buy a computer magazine and type in the basic listings into your computer, because that was a cheap way of getting games.
Invariably they wouldn't work. And so you would then start debugging and then you would start trying to modify the finished game because you realised it was rubbish, and suddenly you're a programmer with out any particular formal training.

And that's how I started programming - doing 6502 machine code, basic, not anything particularly earth shattering but I started to understand what made a game fun and what made good graphics animation.

And then through a chance introduction I met a programmer who had actually been doing games for a while on a computer called the Oric 1, which is an old 6502 8 bit computer from all those years ago. And he was actually [earning] a pretty good living. He was a few years older then me but he was driving to school in a sports car and he was doing pretty well. He was one of those whiz kid programmers that you always read about but didn't know they existed.

He needed a graphic artist and designer because he wanted to concentrate on programming so suddenly there was an opportunity to work with someone who knew what they were doing. And so I dropped the programming bit and started to specialise in just graphics and game design. And after a while I realised that there was lots of other people in the industry who were way better at graphics than I was so I dropped the graphics bit and just focused on the game design.

So you can see where I am going with this. It was kind of a process of elimination.

And then I just started designing games at school, while I was on school holidays, and what have you. I would try and get commissions to design games. It was not by any means the most highly paid work I've ever done, but at least it was work and at least I was getting some experience. That, looking back on it, was a great opportunity to meet people - talk to people, pick up the phone and talk to people, write to people. There was no email in those days, so it was way before anything like that would enable the technology to happen.
One of my first game designs I typed out on the typewriter.

Jacana: You wouldn't want to make mistakes!
Phil:The forerunner to liquid paper was these little sheets that you put in behind the typewriter to strike out. And that's how I worked, because I couldn't afford a printer for my computer, but I did have a typewriter. So my first game design was written on a typewriter. That makes me feel ancient, actually, saying that.

So, I then left school when I was 16, perused this as a proper career and it was very hard for the first year but eventually I got a couple of lucky breaks and started to work full-time for a games company called System Three as a games designer in-house. Designed a game called Myth for Commodore 64 [released in 1989, Myth: History in the Making" by System 3 - http://c64.mobygames.com/game/sheet/gameId,11027/ ].

And then went on from there to a start-up and joined in '89, a company called Mindscape. And then I developed at Mindscape for three years and then in '92 I joined Sony. So, eleven years at Sony.

Jacana:Why games? What was the attraction?
Phil:I loved playing games but I actually preferred playing around with how to make them and tinker with them. And I loved that cause and effect of being able to create your own universe, however primitive, and be able to affect control over it and have some kind of interaction. You know, none of these terms like interactive entertainment existed, or just games, but it was very primitive, but that user interface always interested me. And the fun and stimulation of games - playing them and sharing them with others is a very compelling thing. Now of course, [we] call it entertainment, but it wasn't really considered entertainment in those days and it certainly wouldn't be in any way qualified as entertainment back then. But I could see the pathway towards something that would be quit compelling. I have always been interested in movies, I have always been interested in the theatre, and it was kind of a digital combination of those assets.

I stumbled onto something very luckily, and I always used to say quite arrogantly to my friends that I would be in the movie business eventually, not because I would go to Hollywood and make movies, but because the movie industry would come to us.I think that has actually proven to be the case.

Jacana:Now, with Sony doing the research and development, what particularly are you dealing with? What are some of the things in the past that have come out of the research and development team?
Phil:I was running the R&D group in America when I lived there, but I am longer responsible for that now that I have moved back to Europe.

For four years I was running the R&D group, and our mission was to further the cause of computer entertainment through research that wasn't games. And we were looking at technologies and tools and learning and understanding what could eventually be applied to games, but we weren't actually developing games themselves. So we split the group into some areas of special interest. Some of which was on high performance graphics and the area there was really to borrow from the non real-time Siggraph type papers and bring them into the real-time because of Playstation®2. Because the power of that machine we could then suddenly start taking these algorithms, we could start running them in real-time, so that was one area of the group.

Another was more of the behavioural and physical simulation area and dynamic physics, but also large crowd control flocking. We had a guy called - well we still have a guy called Craig Reynolds [ http://www.red3d.com/cwr/index.html ] who was the pioneer of flocking in our group. And we were able to put into real-time behavioural simulations some really amazing demos that we showed at conferences and what have you.

And then we had an interest in the fact that the PlayStation®2 had USB ports and ILink ports - what did that mean to the interconnectivity? And we had the digital interfaces lab looking at what you could do with audio, what you could do with cameras, what you could do with online areas. And from there is where EyeToy came from.

So EyeToy actually started life in the lab in California under Rick Marks. And then when I moved back to the U.K. I brought him back with me and said, Dump what's in your brain into this development team and let's see if we can make a game out of it."
And two years later we did.

Interview with Sony's Phil Harrison - Part Two

At AGDC this year, Jacana and J.I. Styles had the unique opportunity, thanks to Souri and Sony, to interview the Executive Vice President of Development for Sony Europe, Phil Harrison.

Phil is responsible for the 5 internal studios and the international network of external developers creating PlayStation® and PlayStation®2 products for SCEE. We managed to steal about twenty minutes of Phil's time on Friday and had quite a range of questions to ask. Phil had already been in Australia covering interviews and other business things" by the time we got our hands on him.

The first part of the interview was just to establish Phil's background and entrance into the games industry as well as establishing a bit of background as to what he's been up to at Sony.
The second part of the interview covers questions about the "games" for Eye Toy, PlayStation®2 online in Australia, as well as a few other areas of interest to Sony.
The third part of the interview will be a post AGDC follow-up via email with Phil. While we were asked if we'd be interested in meeting up again later, we could both tell that Phil was very busy and felt that an email follow-up would suit Phil's time and sleep constraints much better.
Phil: Have you had a chance to play eye-toy?

Jacana: Just briefly the little games demo they had set up at the games shop, the first was a sort of karate action one.
Phil: Well that's one of twelve mini-games - that's one of twelve games that's on the disc, there's also ten or a dozen play group effects which are real time video effects, so it's worth checking out the rest of the product to get a real sense of it. The point of it was that we wanted to introduce the concept of full body physical gaming to as wider audience as possible - so by having twelve mini-games any consumer could find something they like, so the kind of traditional game demographic, of the teenage kid would like the karate game. People that like sports games would like the soccer game. There's a couple of music rhythm action dance games which scored very high with non-gamers, and particular teenage girls, which is an area we particularly wanted to target. So that's what prompted us to focus an entire product just on the dance angle of it. And that's where Groove was born out of it.

Jacana: So that will be the first complete or full game for the eye-toy as opposed to the other mini-games?
Phil: We haven't really discovered the word to describe what eye-toy games are yet. You can't compare them to other games. But Groove is dance specific; it has twenty five tracks on it, so that's twenty five fully licensed tunes and a whole bunch of pop music videos so it's as fully featured as any of the rhythm action dance games but you get to use your full body.

Jacana: So are the songs taken from industry or are they more specific to the game?
Phil: They're famous pop songs - Madonna, Jamiroquai, YMCA, Dixie Chicks...

Jacana: Can you tell us about the recent launch of broad-band gaming?
Phil: Well we recently launched in Australia quite successfully, so that's going really well. The challenges of geography in Australia are ones we've overcome by investing locally in servers and infrastructure here to mean that Australians playing against other Australians can have a great consumer experience, which is really important since there's no point hosting the servers in America and having a half second latency, so that's working really well.

One of the games we launched with was Socom: US Navy Seals. It uses voice over IP's, which is a really interesting added dimension to the experience. It's not just voice activation or voice recognition, but it's also community communication using the headsets. We also bundle with the network adaptor a product called Hardware Online Arenas which is a multiplayer tank game - very easy entry into the world of online gaming. In our research we found that lots of people knew what it was but had never had any experience of it, and there's that fear and intimidation of, "what if I'm not any good at it, does that mean I'm going to get shot the moment I walk on screen, or laughed at by my peers" or whatever. So we wanted to make a game that's not as hardcore as Socom, but just as technically and creatively challenging.

The community is what drives it. The games are important, but the community is what drives it.

Jacana: In your research, did you use other case studies to decide whether to put your servers within Australia?
Phil: For us it was obvious that the investment was worthwhile - to other console companies it may not be so obvious and they're yet to make that investment, but I'll let them explain why not.

Jacana: Can you give us a brief overview of your AGDC talk?
Phil: Let me try and summarise it. There's a lot of change happening in our industry, and I wanted to put down a few signposts, just to point people in the directions we're heading in, try and draw a few conclusions from some trends, how development is changing, what the cost of development is going to be, what some of the new platforms are going to be, what some of the opportunities may be - there's no particular theme to my presentation there's some random thoughts kind of joined together by a thread. PSP is obviously a huge opportunity for the business, and I wanted to spend a little bit of time focusing on that, and try and give people some inspiration to what may be possible with the platform.

Jacana: More so to get them to think, than to tell them what to do?
Phil: Exactly, right.

Jacana: In regards to Johns key-note speech this morning, he covered different areas regionally and just the different troubles they're facing, talking about the fall of some of the UK companies that are happening, and the transformation from the PC games market over to the console market - covering trends and attitudes and things like that. What are your thoughts on these issues?
Phil: I actually didn't catch his keynote, so it's unfair of me to draw conclusions from it, but there's a temptation at these events to have a glass half empty approach to the world rather than a half full, and it's very easy to get very introspective and quite miserable about what's happening. We live in very interesting times and of course some companies will be very successful and some won't - but that... has to happen, this industry has to renew, and it has to change, and it has to grow. Look at some companies - there are some companies here that two years from now won't be making games anymore. They will be making a portion of a game, rather than the whole game. They'll be out-sourcing, or they'll be in-sourcing rather. It is already happening a little bit, but it's also going to happen a whole lot more. If you look at trends (and this is a key thing from my speech tomorrow), you'll see that we will spend one hundred million US dollars sometime in the next ten years making a game - and we will regularly spend that. And if a company here has to take a really strong look at themselves, and say, "do I have the management infrastructure to support fifty million dollars of investment?" or, "do I have the infrastructure to support ten million dollars of investment?" And in some cases - most cases - the answer is no. So the world has to change. By the way, this isn't unique to Australia. This isn't just a criticism of just the Australian community.This is a reality