GI: How important do you feel software exclusivity is? You guys touched on it quite a bit, but it seemed to be the case where the games will debut on PlayStation 3 this year, and then come out later on Xbox 360.

Harrison: I can’t really comment on that from the third-party publisher’s point of view, because everything I make is exclusive. You know, we talk about this a lot, and it seems to be a slight obsession. In fact, when you look at it from the eyes of a gamer, when they walk into the store to buy the game that they want to buy because they know it’s great and they hear it’s great, they read about it – they read about it from you. They know it’s a game they should buy for their system. They don’t care who makes it, they just want to make sure the best games are available on their system. I’m happy to be the one who’s providing some of those. I think the balance is important, the portfolio is important, but I think we get a bit obsessed about it, to be quite honest.

GI: I was a little bit confused about something – the Unreal Engine announcement. They announced they were working in conjunction with Sony in optimizing the Unreal 3 engine for the PlayStation 3.

Harrison: Correct.

GI: But that was one of the things two years ago at E3 where you showed Unreal Tournament – with Epic and nVidia – why is this a reannouncement?

Harrison: If we’re honest, we didn’t do enough of a good job supporting them and getting them the tools and technology early enough. Also, Epic isn’t a huge company. They don’t have unlimited resource. We have parachuted in some of our SWAT team of super engineers to help them. Specifically, to optimize for SPUs, which are the point of difference that the Cell Processor has. That process is under way. The benefits that it yields to end developers whether they’re writing exclusive titles or multiplatform titles is that the performance on PS3 goes up exponentially, and it will make for a much better game experience.

GI: I’ve heard from a number of developers that one of the problems with porting a game that’s based on Unreal, or having a multiplatform game that’s based on Unreal, was because Epic didn’t have their tech up to speed and they were waiting for updates. Is this basically saying, “It’s going to get fixed, it’s going to get better?”

Harrison: Yes, I think that’s a fair summary. We know that there are a lot of developers who are using the technology, so this is a significant impact for the industry.

GI: Gran Turismo has bounced around quite a bit. GT HD was great, but it was the demo. Kazunori talked about all of these things they wanted to do originally with downloadable content, and that all got pretty much scrapped for GT5. When was it decided to release Prologue, which is a demo but more of an expanded demo?

Harrison: It’s not a demo, it’s a game. It’s a full game, and it’s got full features.

GI: Will it follow how GT4 Prologue was? Is that the game plan?

Harrison: We’re going to announce details on that in a couple of weeks. I’m not able to go into the specifics. Obviously, one of the metrics is, “How many cars, how many tracks?” I’m not able to share that with you today. But you saw from the quality of the visual fidelity – they are raising the bar up. The way that Polyphony makes their games is very data driven, meaning that when they get one car working on one track it’s database driven, and then voomp – a huge set of content follows. I was looking at that Ferrari 430, and every time we release a GT somebody says, “Oh, it’s photorealistic” Even back to the PlayStation 1 GT. But I think now, it is.

GI: With SingStar, have you decided on the pricing of songs or how the downloadable content will work with the songs?

Harrison: We have a section of the online experience called the SingStore where you can go in and browse the songs. Because there are commercial sensitivities about the pricing, we’ll be competitive. We’ll be very competitive. You’ll be able to buy single songs, a la carte. You’ll be able to browse the entire catalog and buy a single song, and we will also offer value packs where you may be able to get a certain number of songs for a discount. But you will be able to buy single songs ala carte, that’s the main approach.

GI: Are you thinking about certain tie-ins with certain Sony Picture soundtracks, and things like that?

Harrison: Well, we work very broadly with the entire music industry. We’re not exclusively working with Sony Music or Sony Pictures, but clearly some of the Sony united opportunities will be there. We’re working on 12 variations of SingStar at the moment—10 major variations across PS2 and PS3.

GI: How much do you think the price drop on the 60 GB model will help with the penetration in the market?

Harrison: It can only help. If you read what consumers are saying, people say, “We love the system, it’s just a little bit out of reach from a price point of view.” Combined with the games we’ve announced and the games that we’ve shown coming out for this holiday season, those two play very well together.

GI: But $500 is still quite a bit of money.

Harrison: The PS3 is quite a bit of machine. There’s a lot you get for your money. People were camping out in the streets to buy a $500 phone.

GI: Very true, but it’s a lot of things as well.

Harrison: I think the point I’m trying to make, and I think I’m being slightly unfair to Apple, but the point I’m trying to make is $500 – yes, it’s an investment – but you get a lot of value for it.

GI: And the iPhone doesn’t play Blu-ray.

Harrison: Correct. (laughs) You can’t get MotorStorm on the iPhone.

GI: No you can’t. The Home integration stuff that you showed with the mobile phone, is that something that’s going to be limited to only Sony Ericsson phones or is this something you’re planning on rolling out – I mean, will I be able to use an iPhone to shoot pictures?

Harrison: It’s a Java application, so I don’t know if iPhone allows Java applications to be run or not. Any Java-enabled phone will be able to run the client.

GI: What are some of the other things outside of taking photos will you be able to do with your mobile phone?

Harrison: As I said yesterday, clearly the 3D experience is only going to be on PS3 – that kind of rich full functionality. Things that are based on messaging, photos, presence, communication, some of the community features. Perhaps you can imagine getting some kind of in game-to-Web or in-game-to-mobile communication. “Hey Billy, where are you, we’re supposed to be playing MotorStorm.”

GI: At GDC, you introduced the Home setup with your Hall of Fame and trophies, yet most of the developers I’ve spoken with don’t know anything about it and haven’t gotten the software, or don’t have the know how to implement them into their games. It seemed to escape everything at this press conference, and even the first-party developers that I’ve spoken with say, most likely they aren’t going to be able to get them into their games this year. What’s going on with that?

Harrison: We’ve built Home on top of the core libraries of the PlayStation Network platform. The trophy functionality is going into PlayStation Network libraries in the next revision, which will be in August.

GI: So, will we see first-party games this year with trophies in them?

Harrison: I hope so. I mean, this is a long-term plan. Yes it would be great to have all games enabled with trophies this holiday season, but we’ll see that roll out as quickly as we can, but we want to get it right and make sure that it’s a fun and rewarding mechanism for everyone.

GI: Will this system be backwards compatible with games that are already out? Will you be able to patch for example Resistance, MotorStorm, and Lair?

Harrison: Yes. We’re looking into a couple of different way of doing that but yes, we hope to be able to retro-award trophies.

GI: Will you have a score? I know I’m comparing Achievements versus Trophies, but people walk around and wear that score as a badge of honor. Reiner from the magazine has a Gamer Score of 35,000, and he’s Mr. Big Shot. I just cleared 3,000 and I think I’m doing OK. People like wearing that badge of honor, so how are you guys going to do that?

Harrison: We have something, which I can’t share with you today, but we are going to do something which is…how can I answer this without answering it. (laughs)

GI: Well, you can answer it! (laughs)

Harrison: So Gamer Points is kind of macro where that is persistent over all of the games that you play, and then you’ve got the micro based on the individual games. So that idea of being awarded for skill in that particular game, having that mechanism that arches over that entire library – we will have something that performs that function in a different way than points.

GI: Gamers want vibration back in their controlling experience. That’s why it was added in the first place, it adds that immersion. When you’re getting shot in the face in Resistance, I want to feel that. A lot of people expected, alongside the new PSP announcement, what was going on with controllers with vibration. Is this something you see on the horizon for this year, or is this something or 2008?

Harrison: You’re going to get the stock corporate answer here, which is that we’ve kissed and made up with Immersion and we’re working with them, and you’ll see some announcements about future technologies relating to controllers from them and us at another time.

GI: Where do you see Sony sitting this year? Microsoft is steamrolling right now, they’re doing really well. They obviously came a year early and now this year they’re bringing out their big gun – Halo 3. Everyone tries to get out of the way of that blast radius, where do you see yourself at?

Harrison: You’ve actually summed it up the way you asked the question. You can’t build a long-term platform around a single game personality. We’ve taken the strategy of all of our platforms to have a wide range of titles. Look back at our press conference yesterday, the first game we showed was Echochrome, the last game we showed was Killzone 2. Everything in between is the large spectrum of titles that’s bookended by those titles.

GI: Are we going to see Echochrome this year?

Harrison: Yes. We weren’t able to talk about all the cool stuff we’re doing with Echo Chrome, but we’ll come back at the Tokyo Game Show with a deeper dive on that. But I’ll give you a little snippet – there’s a user-created component for that, as well.

GI: Is Metal Gear Solid 4 still exclusive? Is that solidified and will never appear on the Xbox 360?

Harrison: Yes. We said it was an exclusive title.

GI: Now that we’ve finally seen Killzone, and definitely wasn’t the same visual impact as what we saw here at E3…

Harrison: Yes, I was very keen to show that at GDC in context of a technology message rather than game message. I hope that was understood.

GI: I guess that leads me to my question, I mean, when you showed the Killzone trailer, and everyone was like, “That’s not real in-game footage” and there was that huge debate, and then you show the GDC demo, and then you show this demo here which looks far and away better than what you showed at GDC, but still doesn’t seem on point in what you showed at E3 – it’s close but it’s not what that trailer was. Is it tricky when you decide to show, and how you show it?

Harrison: I said all along that I wouldn’t show anything more on Killzone until I was confident that it delivered on the original vision that we had for the title, and I stand by that. We did the same thing with Motorstorm. If you go back, and people have done this infinitely online – compare the vision we set for Motorstorm and what we delivered in the game. What we delivered in the game had more cars, sophisticated physics, more AI, more destruction of the vehicles than we showed in the original vision and we might have had a slightly different shadow map. People don’t buy games for shadow maps.

GI: So the next big splash is Tokyo Game Show?

Harrison: Well we’ve got quite a big summer. Obviously, we’ve got Games Convention in Leipzig, and then we’ve got Tokyo Game Show in September, and we’re doing a media event in Tokyo next week where we’re going to do a bit more detail on Shirokishi which is the RPG we showed at Tokyo Game Show last year – White Knight Chronicles. We’ve got a lot more to show, and we haven’t done the full reveal yet.

GI: What are you most excited for this year?

Harrison: (laughs) That’s a really hard question, because everyone reads what you say and then, “Why didn’t you pick my game, Phil? Why didn’t you pick my game?” I’ll tell you what is a measure of success for me, is when I walk around the office and see what game people are choosing to play on their lunch break, and it’s Warhawk. People love that game. They’re absolutely besoughted by it. The way that the kind of factions are building up in the office the way that the multiplayer experience is working out is pretty cool.