Andrew House offered up this story of how he made the final decision of the PS4′s design:
I actually did choose the design of the console, and I lost sleep over that decision.
The full story was that the original design – with all due respect to [PS4 Industrial Designer Tetsu] Sumii-san – I was not all that happy with at all, so I sent him back to the drawing board. I gave him a few things I was looking for. One was that it [needed to be] a design that was true to the PlayStation DNA. To his credit, he came back with not two, but actually half a dozen designs that all did fulfill the remit. They were in sketch format.
I said, ‘I love these two, but you have to mock them both up, because until I can touch and feel and see the physical [system], I can’t make a decision.’ So he did that, and then I took the two away out of the meeting room, put them in my office, and then they sat there for about a week. I kept looking at them and kept coming back to them. One of our executive team [members] who I was talking to for advice said, ‘Console decisions and designs are an entirely personal issue.’ So he was more or less saying, ‘You’re on your own!’ [Laughs] Once the design was fixed, Ken [Kutaragi] came to the office and looked at the design, but he didn’t tell me what he thought.”
After being asked if House made the right choice, Ken laughed after saying, “That is up for you [to decide].”
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