The man who helped usher in the PS3 for Sony will now be the Xbox 360′s chief evangelist in Europe. Microsoft’s announced that Phil Harrison — formerly president of Worldwide Studios for Sony’s PlayStation division — has joined the tech giant’s leadership team.
It doesn’t feel like 2005 was all that long ago… until you remember that the first iPhone didn’t launch until 2007. In the many years since a former Sony executive could make an offhand remark about the Nintendo DS, touchscreens have taken over, and the tech is getting sharper every year. The future, it seems, can take anyone by surprise.
A little more than a year ago Atari snatched up Sony’s Phil Harrison and went into a hibernation of sorts, cocooning itself away from the media as it and parent company Infogrames worked to reinvent itself.
Last year, in a major coup for the fledgling company, Atari managed to hire former Sony Worldwide Studios boss Phil Harrison to serve as President. Now? Now he’s no longer President.
The history of Sony’s original PlayStation is largely well known to gamers, born of a disagreement with Nintendo, who it once partnered with to provide a CD-ROM drive for the Super Nintendo.
With the PS2 now in its last days, we can safely look back and say that, yes, God of War II was the machine’s swansong. But it could have been oh so different!
Phil Harrison, the game industry’s gentlest, most sharply-dressed giant, worked at Sony for 15 years. Then he left. While he ended up joining Atari, turns out the original plan was to start his own company.
Well, not much with N3: Ninety-Nine Nights II, apparently! According to the upcoming issue of Famitsu, Tetsuya Mizuguchi (
Atari’s plucky bald president Phil Harrison would to show the world that Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick made a big mistake in dropping the Ghostbusters game from the company’s lineup.