Phil Harrison On PlayStation 3 Homebrew

Sony’s head of worldwide studios, Phil Harrison, wants to open up the PlayStation 3 to more homebrew and independent game developers.

Harrison told a recent interviewer that, "I fully support the notion of game development at home using powerful tools available to anyone… We were one of the first companies to recognise this in 1996 with Net Yaroze on PS1 [pictured right]. It's a vital, crucial aspect of the future growth of our industry."

1996, Phil? First company? We don't think so...

Fortunately, Harrison went on to reminisce about the 1980s ‘glory days’ of endless hours typing in endless code from games magazines, noting that:

"You'd spend hours typing in the code, line-by-line, and then countless hours debugging it to make it work and then you'd realise the game was rubbish after all that effort! The next step was to re-write aspects of the game to change the graphics, the sound, the control system or the speed of the gameplay until you'd created something completely new."

Aaah, sweet sweet nostalgia. Back to reality though, thankfully, those days are over!

Harrison is still keen to attract homebrew developers with the PlayStation 3 however, in many ways aping Microsoft’s strategy with its recently launched XNA homebrew gaming kit.

"If we can make certain aspects of PS3 open to the independent game development community, we will do our industry a service by providing opportunities for the next generation of creative and technical talent," opines Harrison.

Some, more cynical observers in the SPOnG office have noted that it is a shame that Sony cannot embrace the PSP homebrew game development community in similar ways.

^{(Source: Slashdot)}