In early 1993, Shuhei Yoshida joined Sony’s nascent PlayStation division as a business development guy – the first member of the team who didn’t have an engineering background. When he was working with Ken Kutaragi and the other architects of the original PlayStation, and later producing games from Crash Bandicoot and Gran Turismo alongside game development legends Mark Cerny and Kazunori Yamauchi, he freely admits that he could scarcely believe his luck. When I speak to him, on the eve of receiving Bafta’s prestigious fellowship award for his contribution to video games, he still seems endearingly surprised by his own success.
“The people who have received [this award] before are all creators! Amazing, talented, genius people! I don’t know how I fit in,” he says. (Previous recipients of the award include Shigeru Miyamoto and Hideo Kojima.) “But everybody says I deserve it, so I guess I deserve it.”
