Loot: The Phil Harrison Interview, Part I
Enlarge "Shadow of the Colossus" is the Western title of Sony Computer Entertainment's much-praised 2005 game. But for worldwide studios president Phil Harrison, it could also serve as the title of his autobiography, given the way that the 6'7'' Brit has increasingly become the public face of Playstation. We first met the unflappably smooth Harrison in 1999 when he was Sony's head of third-party relations and R&D for North America. After he returned to the U.K in 2000 to run Playstation's European studio operation, the division turned out such mass-appeal franchises as EyeToy, SingStar and Buzz! before his 2005 promotion to his current position.
We sat down to lunch with Harrison during the last day of the D.I.C.E. Summit earlier this month in Las Vegas; just a day earlier, we had grilled Harrison before the conference attendees with a series of pointed questions that the Level Up staff gathered from top developers about the state of the Playstation 3. The result of our mealtime sit-down is an epic four-part Q&A that covers such varied topics as how the graphics in Microsoft's newest hit Gears of War compare to Sony's own Resistance: Fall of Man; the controversy over Super Columbine Massacre RPG!; which mistakes from the run-up to launch he wishes that he could fix; and some scoops about upcoming features for both Resistance and the PS3 itself. So sit back, grab an espresso or a Red Bull, and enjoy the ride.
Before I go into my questions, I think there was something that you wanted to address first.
Yes, I want to clarify something. You put something on your blog about how comments from videogame executives can come back to haunt them. Of all the things I've said--and there are plenty of things should come back to haunt me--what you quoted was not one of them. The quote in question actually came from the GDC Europe interview that I did onstage with [Game Developers Conference director] Jamil Moledina a couple of years back. He was asking my view on Microsoft's two SKU strategy. The point that I made, which was not clearly reported in the Gamasutra piece [that Level Up cited], was that Microsoft had introduced two SKUs, they were effectively two different products: one with a hard drive and one without. And that while I wasn't going to talk about our particular SKU strategy at that time, whatever strategy we would adopt would not confuse developers and publishers, because the underlying platform would be with the hard drive in every machine. So I stand by what I said.
Well, I'm certainly willing to correct the record. Earlier today, Ken Lobb from Microsoft told me, "I have a lot of respect for Phil for the session he did with you. There aren't a lot of executives that would put themselves in a position to be asked tough questions, and more than that, publicly." You and I had a preliminary conversation to discuss the ground rules and the framework for this forum, then I went off and approached developers to gather the questions that they wanted answered. But my readers would probably like to know from your end, why would you be interested in using this kind of forum to address the D.I.C.E. community?
Well, as you have observed in the past, platform holders have been guilty of PowerPoint sales presentations at D.I.C.E. And D.I.C.E. is the kind of conference that's much more convivial, much more intellectual and much more engaging with the audience. So first of all, I wanted to avoid the overly branded PowerPoint presentation.
The fact that you avoided using PowerPoint--that's not a slap at Microsoft, is it?
No. [Laughs.] I mean slides, pre-canned information. I know that in the past, executives from Nintendo and Microsoft have flown in, given a pre-canned PowerPoint presentation about their business and then flown out again, and not even stayed for all of DICE. So I wanted to avoid that.
Without being sycophantic, having huge respect for you as a writer and a commentator in the industry, I knew that if we did it this way, you would have the credibility and the independence and the intelligence in your questions to make it interesting to the crowd. So that's why I wanted to approach you to do it, and I'm really glad that you did.
Thank you.
I actually had a hoot doing it, and I think that was clear to the audience as well. A lot of people have commented on that. And I suppose to a certain extent there was a desire to perhaps humanize the organization a bit, take a bit of the faceless edge off the organization and say to the development community, "We are interested and willing to engage in these kind of dialogues."
Not to be too sycophantic myself; this next point may have been lost a bit on some people in the audience and some people online, because of the various jobs you've held within Playstation. The point is this: a lot of the developer questions that I asked you onstage, and a lot of the particularly tough questions, aren't actually your bailiwick.
Right.
You have a clear job description, but you're also one of the people who serves as the face of Playstation, and you're expected to go out and talk about it. You could have easily stuck to your knitting and just said, "Hey, I'm just going to talk about the games that we're making." Why would you put yourself forward to tackle these other areas of discussion that aren't in your portfolio?
Well as you pointed out, it used to be my job, so I have empathy with the development community for the challenges that they are facing. I think sometimes things are not as dark or as bleak as people make out. Still, the sentiment is there, the frustration is there, and as I said yesterday, "We have to do better." And we will do better. But I don't think it is so broken as to be catastrophic. Taking off my worldwide studios hat, as a corporate executive I have to be aware of these issues and I have to communicate these issues to other people in the organization.
Looking at the reaction to our session on some of the message boards, some people have distilled your responses to "potential." As in, "This is coming," "This is off in the future," "This is going to happen." Some people were expressing a desire for some of these changes and improvements to happen right now, right this minute. And there even some people--the more virulent anti-Playstation gamers--who wanted to go back and rehash the launch, as in "Why did all these units end up on eBay?" and the like. How do you respond to that desire from the development community to receive their requested fixes and solutions right now, and the desire from some gamers to rehash the past? And isn't it appropriate for them to look at the past and the present and say, "Where's the evidence that it's going to get better in the future?"
Perfectly legitimate question. But let's not forget the discussion yesterday was unscripted. I didn't know what questions were going to be asked; therefore I couldn't have in my back pocket an announcement that would solve everybody's woes in one go. Also, D.I.C.E. is not the right place to do that. There are other more controllable--not controllable, more appropriate--forums to talk to our stakeholders in a more managed way. GDC being one of them.
I wanted to ask you about the exchange, the back-and-forth between you and Cliffyb last night at the AIAS awards. What was that about? What happened?
The exchange? How do you mean?
You presented him with an award.
Right.
And you mock-downplayed his win--
Yeah, I did, but--
That's what I mean.
--it was for theatrical effect. I was not trying to make a point. I was just hamming it up on stage, that was all. I mean, genuinely, they deserved to win those awards. They made the best game in those categories. I don't think anybody in the room would have any partisan view of that. But I think after somebody's been on stage six times to pick up an award, after the fourth or fifth time, it's perfectly legitimate to give them a bit of s--t. I think there's nothing wrong with that. And he can take it, so...
Absolutely. Now with Gears of War and [your company's game] Resistance, a lot of people were saying--whether at Microsoft or outside of Microsoft, consumers or reviewers--that Gears of War was the best looking game of last year.
Yep.
While there were a lot of really good things about Resistance, what occurred to me about the graphical difference between the two games, was that the environments in Resistance were more open in many places, whereas Gears was more contained. But what Gears achieved was more visual consistency: everything in the game looked very high-def. Whereas I felt that with Resistance, there was a high-low thing going on. The characters and a lot of the environment would seem high-def, but then you'd have a berm or other elements that didn't look as high-def.
I think that's a fair observation. The slightly toon-shader look of Gears of War felt a bit like "A Scanner Darkly," or...
"Waking Life"?
No the other one before that..."Sin City." They had a very stylized look, which was clearly inspired by comic books--in my view of it--and the kind of pastiche super-hero comic book that they were trying to create lends itself very well to that visual style. Whereas Resistance is attempting to have almost a historical reenactment. The story is supposed to be a bit more gritty, a bit more realistic, and it's harder to maintain that consistency throughout a game. Then layer on top of the complexities of launching a game on a hard date with a system, and yadda, yadda, yadda. But I still think that there are some great moments in Resistance where they cast a remixed vision of the future from a historical perspective really, really well.
The flip side of Resistance is that on some of the message boards that I've read--at the risk of name checking them, NeoGAF--the thread on Resistance is still going strong. Before Resistance shipped in November, the reaction rose and fell with the quality of each screenshot that got posted. Then it got into people's hands, and there was a little bit of early disappointment. Then as people got further into the game, people were posting their own screenshots and videos and saying, "It keeps getting better and better." Every time I go on NeoGAF, I'm wondering, why is this thread still going? And what's keeping it going now is the multiplayer. Now NeoGAF is a small snapshot; there are more people on the IGN message boards or the Gamespot boards. But is that response a harbinger of Resistance having greater legs than its initial sales might have indicated? And when you talk to the publishing side of Playstation, do they have plans for development and marketing and PR to keep that going so that Resistance can continue to find an audience?
Absolutely. We're going to release additional content for Resistance. I don't think we've gone into detail on the schedule, but we have some really, really cool things that will be extending the story, extending the locations, some brand new content, starting in April. So if that works well and is well-received by the audience, then that will keep the engagement with game going between now and should there be a sequel at some point in the future.
Part II: Harrison gives props to Gears of War, raises a concern about Nintendo's Mii avatars, and wades into the Super Columbine Massacre! RPG controversy.
DD
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