Ever since he was a boy, Shuhei Yoshida dreamed of living outside Japan. Born and raised in Kyoto, Yoshida studied science at his local university and spent his college downtime slaying beasts in Dragon Quest. He yearned to embark on a globe-trotting adventure of his own--and just like in his favorite RPG, destiny soon came calling.
Yoshida landed a job at Sony fresh out of college, excitedly joining the company's corporate strategy group. "With Walkman, TV and video, 80% to 90% of Sony's business was done outside Japan," Yoshida recalls, "So, I thought, at Sony, I might have a chance to live outside Japan."
Working under Sony's management group, Yoshida's job was to help grow internal businesses. There was one new team that caught Yoshida's eye: a small group, led by Ken Kutaragi, that had just finished developing the audio chip for Nintendo's massively successful SNES console. Although it was one of Yoshida's colleagues who was ultimately assigned to the project, Yoshida says he tried to assist with Kutaragi's project wherever he could. "Ken's team then started to work on a CD-ROM system for Super Nintendo," Yoshida said. "My colleague was not a big video game fan, so I was giving advice to him."
Console modder Ben Heck got the Nintendo PlayStation prototype's CD drive running in 2017
As Yoshida excitedly gushed about video games to anyone who'd listen, Kutaragi's team worked diligently to provide Nintendo with the SNES CD-ROM expansion. Its working name? The Nintendo PlayStation. As Sony experimented with laptops and PCs, Yoshida kept his head down until 1991, when Sony's relationship with Nintendo suddenly went up in flames.
"At CES, Sony was preparing to announce the original Nintendo PlayStation," Yoshida explains. "But a couple of days before that, Nintendo announced a collaboration with Philips to release the CD-ROM attachment, instead."
After years of collaboration with Nintendo, it was a move that stunned everyone at Sony. "I think it was vaporware," reflects Yoshida of Nintendo's Phillips CD-ROM console, which ultimately never materialized. "I think [Nintendo] just made the announcement to get out of the contract with Sony." Whatever Nintendo's reasoning, Sony had been very publicly betrayed. "After that, Sony had two choices," Yoshida says. "Get out of the video game business or create their own console."
As we all know, Sony opted for the latter. Yet it wasn't enough just to release a rival console--for Sony's furious upper management, their machine had to wipe the floor with Nintendo's upcoming console. "Ken [Kutaragi] leveraged the anger of Sony management to get the investment that he needed to make a console with real-time 3D graphics," reveals Yoshida. "So it ended up being a much higher performance system than the original [Nintendo PlayStation], which was based on Super NES tech."
After partnering with Sony Music to help fund the company's ambitious game console, operation PlayStation was a go. In February 1993, Yoshida's years of excitable office video games chatter finally paid off and he was assigned to Kutaragi's PlayStation third-party licensing team. "Everyone else on my team were engineers," Yoshida says. "I felt incredibly lucky."
Under Sony Music Japan's tutelage, Yoshida's team approached their new console like a record label, going from door-to-door, vying to convince massive game publishers and indies alike to bring their games to Sony's new system. Yet Yoshida and Kutaragi didn't just have to overcome skepticism in Sony's gaming chops, but publishers' doubts around 3D gaming itself.
"A small number of companies were fascinated by the capability of PlayStation's real time 3D," Yoshida says of his initial meetings. "But at the time, most people were not familiar with 3D graphics." Luckily, that same year, Sega revealed Virtua Fighter for arcades, the first true 3D fighting game, and publishers finally began to see 3D's potential.
"As soon as that announcement happened, I got lots of phone calls from companies who were very interested to work with PlayStation," Yoshida recalls. "Sega Saturn was the biggest competition for PlayStation, but Sega really helped to educate the industry that 3D graphics can be used for more than racing or shooting games."
While Virtua Fighter eventually swayed the 3D skeptics, Yoshida says one publisher believed in PlayStation from the very beginning: Bandai Namco. Yoshida called the company Sony's "biggest ally for the launch of PlayStation." Part of this relationship stemmed from Namco having 3D arcade games ready to go while the current lineup of 16-bit consoles remained unable to run them. Ridge Racer and Tekken ultimately became crucial day-one graphical showcases for Sony's new console.
Yet it was winning over Nintendo's former third-party darling, Squaresoft (now known as Square Enix following a merger), that cemented PlayStation's Japanese success. "Square obviously had a huge hit with Final Fantasy games on Super Nintendo, " says Yoshida. "However, Sakaguchi-san, the creator, was very unhappy with the decision that Nintendo made with Nintendo 64 to use cartridges." Sakaguchi dreamed of shipping games with full 3D movies--epics that could truly immerse players in his fantastical world. "The cartridge has such a small memory that they didn't allow him to realize this vision," explains Yoshida. "So, he was very interested to work on a CD-ROM-based system."
PlayStation, however, wasn't the only CD-ROM system in town. With Sega also trying to nab Square's newest game, Sony was desperate to sign Final Fantasy VII first. Luckily, Sony had a secret weapon up its sleeve. "My boss, who came from Sony Music Japan, was a really amazing schmoozer," smiles Yoshida. "He hung out with another vice president of Square who was running the business side. I was taken with them to have dinner or do karaoke so many times, and he schmoozed and somehow convinced them that Sony is easy to work with." The secret behind Final Fantasy VII coming to PlayStation? Sake and karaoke. "That's how business is done in Japan!" laughs Yoshida.
The rest, as they say, is history. PlayStation launched in Japan in December 1994 and was a huge hit, shifting 300,000 units in its first year in Japan before finding success in Europe and the US in 1995. Another factor that Yoshida attributes to PlayStation's success was Sony Music's insistence that game developers were given the spotlight. "In their mind, game creators are artists like musicians," explains Yoshida. "Some companies didn't allow the game developers to put their real name in the game's credits because they were afraid of other companies stealing these developers. But PlayStation said, 'Let's get the magazine to interview creators;, let's make them stars!'"
The PS3 launched on November 11, 2006 in Japan
With third parties flocking to the console in droves, Yoshida's job was complete. He was soon shifted over to head up first-party projects, where he helped produce games like Ape Escape and The Legend of Dragoon. Yet there was one PS1 classic that got away. "Another team I put together was not able to finish their game on PS1, which was Ico," says Yoshida of the Fumito Ueda classic. "We had an amazing-looking prototype. However, the game was not performing well on PS1. Ueda-san's ambition was too high and the game was running at 10fps, so I moved the project to PS2."
Then, in 2000, Yoshida finally realized his childhood dream and moved to the US to become the head of development for Sony's American studios. Sony, meanwhile, was also living out a dream of its own, as its once-unproven gaming upstart had now become the dominant console in the PS2 generation. While Yoshida laments a few missed exclusives--"Capcom decided to release Resident Evil 4 on GameCube, why?! We had Resident Evil 1, 2, and 3 on PlayStation..."--as the end of the PS2 generation rolled around, Sony seemed unstoppable.
And then, it all went wrong.
When the PS3 arrived in 2006, its prohibitively expensive price point ($499.99) and difficult-to-develop-for architecture turned the PS3 generation into a hubristic disaster. Suddenly, Sony was losing ground to another electronics company that had belatedly entered the console space, Microsoft.
"The PS3 generation was hard," recalls Yoshida. "For the first couple of years it was really tough to see the same games come out on PS3 and Xbox 360, and the Xbox 360 version performing better. In theory, PS3 was going to be much higher performance, but at launch we were not able to show that. We had first-party games like Resistance looking great, but then third-party games were constantly compared side-by-side unfavorably to 360. It was quite shocking."
By the end of the generation, the PS3 had toughed it out, eventually amassing an enviable lineup of exclusive titles. It's these mature, story-led games that would ultimately set the tone for Sony's enviable PS4 library. The quality of these games is one that Yoshida ultimately attributes to Sony executives' patience; although they weren't happy about it, Yoshida says his bosses allowed him to delay unfinished PS3 games no matter the cost.
"Every year I had to apologize to the business side that we have to delay this game," says Yoshida. "But the company understood that by spending enough time and polishing the game, in the end, the game will sell more than rushing it out."
One such game that Yoshida had to keep delaying? An ambitious zombie project from the creators of Uncharted. "It was a bit surprising that Naughty Dog wanted to move on from Uncharted, but also that they were going to create something really mature," he recalls. "Uncharted was like a summer blockbuster movie for a very broad audience, so I was a little concerned that we may be going too niche by going so mature. But in the end, their craft produced such an amazing game that they established an IP even bigger than Uncharted, [The Last of Us]. I'm so excited that they are working on a new IP again with Intergalactic."
The end of the PS3 generation saw a change of leadership from Ken Kutaragi to Kaz Hirai, and from then, Yoshida focused on helping developers collaborate with the hardware team during the production of the PS4--an effort to ensure that the disaster of the PS3 generation never happened again.
"Kaz asked me to move to Japan to work very closely with the hardware team," Yoshida recalls. "I was able to connect them to the right Worldwide Studio members and that's how PS4 and PS Vita, in my mind, became really good systems for developers to make games for."
In his final years at Sony, Yoshida moved away from top-level first-party decisions and went back to his PS1 roots. Try as he might, he became less interested in the AAA titles hogging the spotlight and was instead drawn to the quirky indie curiosities beckoning from the shadows.
"I was a huge proponent of indie games," smiles Yoshida. "Every time I went to a games show like E3 or Gamescom, even though we had booths to show our big, first-party titles, I went to the indie area. When I saw a game that I liked, I [took] a photo with the developers and [tried] to help promote these games. We were able to support games like Journey… And that led me to become the evangelist of indie games for PlayStation for the last five years of my career there."
Yoshida has always been a champion of indie games
As of January 2025, Yoshida is a freelance consultant, working directly with indie developers. As well as being a notable indie champion, Yoshida is also a huge advocate for VR, working with long-standing VR developer NDreams on the recently launched game Reach. This is hardly a new passion for Yoshida, though, as he reveals that he was pivotal in bringing PSVR to the market. "I was involved in the hardware development of the first PSVR," says Yoshida. "The project started as a grassroots activity from Santa Monica Studio during [the] PS3 days."
Using the PS Move's 3D-tracking, Sony Santa Monica jerry-rigged a crude, handmade VR headset together in their spare time. Yoshida was instantly sold. "They customized a God of War game on PS3 and I tried it, and I was like, 'Wow, I'm in God of War!' I looked down and I was Kratos! It was an amazing experience."
As he excitedly tells me about his Xbox ROG Ally X preorder and laments the death of the Vita, it's impossible not to leave the conversation charmed by Shuhei Yoshida. There's a sense of playfulness about him--one that you can feel throughout the many of the initiatives he spearheaded at PlayStation, as well. From the quirky curation of games of the PS1 era to the childlike wonder of PSVR, after 39 years, Yoshida's playful spirit will undoubtedly be missed by PlayStation fans.
"The PS1 generation was like an indie scene," Yoshida smiles. "There were so many small teams making interesting new concepts that came out of nowhere. So many hit products that came from non-traditional game creators." Now as Yoshida leaves Sony behind and enters a new chapter of guiding independent creators, it seems he's ready to share that playfulness with the wider world.
Source
Yoshida landed a job at Sony fresh out of college, excitedly joining the company's corporate strategy group. "With Walkman, TV and video, 80% to 90% of Sony's business was done outside Japan," Yoshida recalls, "So, I thought, at Sony, I might have a chance to live outside Japan."
Working under Sony's management group, Yoshida's job was to help grow internal businesses. There was one new team that caught Yoshida's eye: a small group, led by Ken Kutaragi, that had just finished developing the audio chip for Nintendo's massively successful SNES console. Although it was one of Yoshida's colleagues who was ultimately assigned to the project, Yoshida says he tried to assist with Kutaragi's project wherever he could. "Ken's team then started to work on a CD-ROM system for Super Nintendo," Yoshida said. "My colleague was not a big video game fan, so I was giving advice to him."
Console modder Ben Heck got the Nintendo PlayStation prototype's CD drive running in 2017
The Nintendo Betraystation
As Yoshida excitedly gushed about video games to anyone who'd listen, Kutaragi's team worked diligently to provide Nintendo with the SNES CD-ROM expansion. Its working name? The Nintendo PlayStation. As Sony experimented with laptops and PCs, Yoshida kept his head down until 1991, when Sony's relationship with Nintendo suddenly went up in flames.
"At CES, Sony was preparing to announce the original Nintendo PlayStation," Yoshida explains. "But a couple of days before that, Nintendo announced a collaboration with Philips to release the CD-ROM attachment, instead."
After years of collaboration with Nintendo, it was a move that stunned everyone at Sony. "I think it was vaporware," reflects Yoshida of Nintendo's Phillips CD-ROM console, which ultimately never materialized. "I think [Nintendo] just made the announcement to get out of the contract with Sony." Whatever Nintendo's reasoning, Sony had been very publicly betrayed. "After that, Sony had two choices," Yoshida says. "Get out of the video game business or create their own console."
As we all know, Sony opted for the latter. Yet it wasn't enough just to release a rival console--for Sony's furious upper management, their machine had to wipe the floor with Nintendo's upcoming console. "Ken [Kutaragi] leveraged the anger of Sony management to get the investment that he needed to make a console with real-time 3D graphics," reveals Yoshida. "So it ended up being a much higher performance system than the original [Nintendo PlayStation], which was based on Super NES tech."
Hell hath no fury like a Sony scorned
After partnering with Sony Music to help fund the company's ambitious game console, operation PlayStation was a go. In February 1993, Yoshida's years of excitable office video games chatter finally paid off and he was assigned to Kutaragi's PlayStation third-party licensing team. "Everyone else on my team were engineers," Yoshida says. "I felt incredibly lucky."
Under Sony Music Japan's tutelage, Yoshida's team approached their new console like a record label, going from door-to-door, vying to convince massive game publishers and indies alike to bring their games to Sony's new system. Yet Yoshida and Kutaragi didn't just have to overcome skepticism in Sony's gaming chops, but publishers' doubts around 3D gaming itself.
"A small number of companies were fascinated by the capability of PlayStation's real time 3D," Yoshida says of his initial meetings. "But at the time, most people were not familiar with 3D graphics." Luckily, that same year, Sega revealed Virtua Fighter for arcades, the first true 3D fighting game, and publishers finally began to see 3D's potential.
"As soon as that announcement happened, I got lots of phone calls from companies who were very interested to work with PlayStation," Yoshida recalls. "Sega Saturn was the biggest competition for PlayStation, but Sega really helped to educate the industry that 3D graphics can be used for more than racing or shooting games."
While Virtua Fighter eventually swayed the 3D skeptics, Yoshida says one publisher believed in PlayStation from the very beginning: Bandai Namco. Yoshida called the company Sony's "biggest ally for the launch of PlayStation." Part of this relationship stemmed from Namco having 3D arcade games ready to go while the current lineup of 16-bit consoles remained unable to run them. Ridge Racer and Tekken ultimately became crucial day-one graphical showcases for Sony's new console.
Yet it was winning over Nintendo's former third-party darling, Squaresoft (now known as Square Enix following a merger), that cemented PlayStation's Japanese success. "Square obviously had a huge hit with Final Fantasy games on Super Nintendo, " says Yoshida. "However, Sakaguchi-san, the creator, was very unhappy with the decision that Nintendo made with Nintendo 64 to use cartridges." Sakaguchi dreamed of shipping games with full 3D movies--epics that could truly immerse players in his fantastical world. "The cartridge has such a small memory that they didn't allow him to realize this vision," explains Yoshida. "So, he was very interested to work on a CD-ROM-based system."
Shmoozing Sake-guchi
PlayStation, however, wasn't the only CD-ROM system in town. With Sega also trying to nab Square's newest game, Sony was desperate to sign Final Fantasy VII first. Luckily, Sony had a secret weapon up its sleeve. "My boss, who came from Sony Music Japan, was a really amazing schmoozer," smiles Yoshida. "He hung out with another vice president of Square who was running the business side. I was taken with them to have dinner or do karaoke so many times, and he schmoozed and somehow convinced them that Sony is easy to work with." The secret behind Final Fantasy VII coming to PlayStation? Sake and karaoke. "That's how business is done in Japan!" laughs Yoshida.
The rest, as they say, is history. PlayStation launched in Japan in December 1994 and was a huge hit, shifting 300,000 units in its first year in Japan before finding success in Europe and the US in 1995. Another factor that Yoshida attributes to PlayStation's success was Sony Music's insistence that game developers were given the spotlight. "In their mind, game creators are artists like musicians," explains Yoshida. "Some companies didn't allow the game developers to put their real name in the game's credits because they were afraid of other companies stealing these developers. But PlayStation said, 'Let's get the magazine to interview creators;, let's make them stars!'"
The PS3 launched on November 11, 2006 in Japan
With third parties flocking to the console in droves, Yoshida's job was complete. He was soon shifted over to head up first-party projects, where he helped produce games like Ape Escape and The Legend of Dragoon. Yet there was one PS1 classic that got away. "Another team I put together was not able to finish their game on PS1, which was Ico," says Yoshida of the Fumito Ueda classic. "We had an amazing-looking prototype. However, the game was not performing well on PS1. Ueda-san's ambition was too high and the game was running at 10fps, so I moved the project to PS2."
Then, in 2000, Yoshida finally realized his childhood dream and moved to the US to become the head of development for Sony's American studios. Sony, meanwhile, was also living out a dream of its own, as its once-unproven gaming upstart had now become the dominant console in the PS2 generation. While Yoshida laments a few missed exclusives--"Capcom decided to release Resident Evil 4 on GameCube, why?! We had Resident Evil 1, 2, and 3 on PlayStation..."--as the end of the PS2 generation rolled around, Sony seemed unstoppable.
And then, it all went wrong.
The PS3 generation, and a cell of Sony's own creation
When the PS3 arrived in 2006, its prohibitively expensive price point ($499.99) and difficult-to-develop-for architecture turned the PS3 generation into a hubristic disaster. Suddenly, Sony was losing ground to another electronics company that had belatedly entered the console space, Microsoft.
"The PS3 generation was hard," recalls Yoshida. "For the first couple of years it was really tough to see the same games come out on PS3 and Xbox 360, and the Xbox 360 version performing better. In theory, PS3 was going to be much higher performance, but at launch we were not able to show that. We had first-party games like Resistance looking great, but then third-party games were constantly compared side-by-side unfavorably to 360. It was quite shocking."
By the end of the generation, the PS3 had toughed it out, eventually amassing an enviable lineup of exclusive titles. It's these mature, story-led games that would ultimately set the tone for Sony's enviable PS4 library. The quality of these games is one that Yoshida ultimately attributes to Sony executives' patience; although they weren't happy about it, Yoshida says his bosses allowed him to delay unfinished PS3 games no matter the cost.
"Every year I had to apologize to the business side that we have to delay this game," says Yoshida. "But the company understood that by spending enough time and polishing the game, in the end, the game will sell more than rushing it out."
One such game that Yoshida had to keep delaying? An ambitious zombie project from the creators of Uncharted. "It was a bit surprising that Naughty Dog wanted to move on from Uncharted, but also that they were going to create something really mature," he recalls. "Uncharted was like a summer blockbuster movie for a very broad audience, so I was a little concerned that we may be going too niche by going so mature. But in the end, their craft produced such an amazing game that they established an IP even bigger than Uncharted, [The Last of Us]. I'm so excited that they are working on a new IP again with Intergalactic."
Unifying hardware and software
The end of the PS3 generation saw a change of leadership from Ken Kutaragi to Kaz Hirai, and from then, Yoshida focused on helping developers collaborate with the hardware team during the production of the PS4--an effort to ensure that the disaster of the PS3 generation never happened again.
"Kaz asked me to move to Japan to work very closely with the hardware team," Yoshida recalls. "I was able to connect them to the right Worldwide Studio members and that's how PS4 and PS Vita, in my mind, became really good systems for developers to make games for."
In his final years at Sony, Yoshida moved away from top-level first-party decisions and went back to his PS1 roots. Try as he might, he became less interested in the AAA titles hogging the spotlight and was instead drawn to the quirky indie curiosities beckoning from the shadows.
"I was a huge proponent of indie games," smiles Yoshida. "Every time I went to a games show like E3 or Gamescom, even though we had booths to show our big, first-party titles, I went to the indie area. When I saw a game that I liked, I [took] a photo with the developers and [tried] to help promote these games. We were able to support games like Journey… And that led me to become the evangelist of indie games for PlayStation for the last five years of my career there."
Yoshida has always been a champion of indie games
A new chapter
As of January 2025, Yoshida is a freelance consultant, working directly with indie developers. As well as being a notable indie champion, Yoshida is also a huge advocate for VR, working with long-standing VR developer NDreams on the recently launched game Reach. This is hardly a new passion for Yoshida, though, as he reveals that he was pivotal in bringing PSVR to the market. "I was involved in the hardware development of the first PSVR," says Yoshida. "The project started as a grassroots activity from Santa Monica Studio during [the] PS3 days."
Using the PS Move's 3D-tracking, Sony Santa Monica jerry-rigged a crude, handmade VR headset together in their spare time. Yoshida was instantly sold. "They customized a God of War game on PS3 and I tried it, and I was like, 'Wow, I'm in God of War!' I looked down and I was Kratos! It was an amazing experience."
As he excitedly tells me about his Xbox ROG Ally X preorder and laments the death of the Vita, it's impossible not to leave the conversation charmed by Shuhei Yoshida. There's a sense of playfulness about him--one that you can feel throughout the many of the initiatives he spearheaded at PlayStation, as well. From the quirky curation of games of the PS1 era to the childlike wonder of PSVR, after 39 years, Yoshida's playful spirit will undoubtedly be missed by PlayStation fans.
"The PS1 generation was like an indie scene," Yoshida smiles. "There were so many small teams making interesting new concepts that came out of nowhere. So many hit products that came from non-traditional game creators." Now as Yoshida leaves Sony behind and enters a new chapter of guiding independent creators, it seems he's ready to share that playfulness with the wider world.
Source