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Darren Waters

Phil Harrison's surprise goodbye

  • Darren Waters
  • 26 Feb 08, 03:22 GMT

Phil Harrison has from Sony as president of their worldwide studios.

So that's why he wasn't doing any interviews at GDC this year!!

I had a chance to grab a few words with Phil Harrison last week at an event organised by developer Dave Perry. Before going to San Francisco I had asked to speak with him but had been told by Sony's PR team that Phil was stepping away somewhat from being seen as the face/voice of Sony games development.

Of course, all the pieces fit now. It's clear this was not a dramatic departure but one Sony had been aware of for sometime.

Quite how long is unclear - as is Mr Harrison's reasons for leaving the firm, especially now that many of the PlayStation 3's launch problems are dissolving.

I have no insider knowledge on why he's left. All I can say is that he was very relaxed and pointedly frank last week during a roundtable discussion on the future of gaming.

Within a few minutes of conversation he had criticised Sony in Japan for not seeing the value in social gaming early enough and predicted the death of consoles by declaring that public utility computing - ie gaming over the network - was the industry's future.

His frankness is also more easily understood now.

So where will he go? The bigger publishers have lots of developer studios all around the world these days so Phil Harrison's skills would be welcome at someone like EA or Ubisoft, I'm sure. There are rumours of a move to Atari, although the source on this is cloudy and I wonder if they are high profile enough.
But I'm often wrong...

One final point - when I finished chatting to Phil I suggested we catch up on my return to London and he agreed.

So Phil, if you're still interested in meeting up, I'd love to hear what's on the horizon.

Drop me an e-mail: darrenDOTwatersATbbcDOTcoDOTuk

Comments

I think it's funny how it's believed that fudging an email address with AT, DOT, or or any other replacement of characters are enough to fool a bot that is capable of trawling the web and picking out email addresses all by itself. I think the spammers might have thought of that by now. ;)

P.S. Big fan of the blog and your twitters!

  • 2.
  • At 04:15 PM on 26 Feb 2008,
  • Thomas Brownlee wrote:

I think the PS3 problems dissolving are why he is leaving.

Phil could have left at any time in the past year, when SCE was in dark times, now it's on the up, he's leaving the company with somewhere to go. He was unhappy with SCEJ, but was professional enough to put it aside until the PS3 built some steam.

Can you imagine another exec taking over in the midst of all the trouble with no idea of how SCE works?

Kudos to Phil for seeing the PS3 through from launch to viable consumer product and kudos for actually 100% believing in the products you were selling.

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