Shuhei Yoshida looks back at 31 years at Sony PlayStation | exit interview
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Summary
As the first employee assigned to work with game makers on the original PlayStation, Shinji Yoshida had his work cut out for him in the 1980s.
The first PlayStation faced skepticism from within Sony, which was more focused on electronics and had already broken precedent by working with Nintendo on a game machine that fell apart.
Yoshida had to recruit developers and publishers in Japan, despite a language barrier and a perception that the then-teenager Yoshida didn’t know what he was doing.
The PlayStation disrupted the gaming business in the 1990s and 2000s as Sony iterated on the hardware, leading to the PS2, PS3, PS4, and PS5.
With each new PlayStation, Yoshida took on new roles in engineering, business development, and studio relations, forming GamesBeat editor Dean Takahashi’s ” interesting collection of people that all came together through PlayStation.”
Yoshida, who left Sony last year, has turned his attention to working with smaller, independent game studios.