In Part II of our voluminous four-part Q&A with Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios president Phil Harrison, he told us why he doesn't believe that Nintendo's "lo-fi" Mii avatars will appeal to everyone and admitted that he was on the fence about Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, the controversial game that was booted from the Slamdance games festival. Today in Part III, Harrison explains why Guitar Hero succeeded in a way that Frequency and Amplitude did not, cops to some mistakes in the run-up to last November's launch, and reveals that even he's occasionally caught off-guard by some of the PS3's firmware updates.

I saw this morning's presentation by [Harmonix co-founder] Alex Rigopoulos--

I was there too. I really enjoyed that.

I thought it was really good. One of the things he talked about was the success of SingStar in Europe.

He was quite guarded, I thought, in his statement "It's doing reasonably well in Europe." Oh, is it? Okay. Seven million units is obviously not qualifying it as doing "very well."

Over here, it's still not as well-known why it's been so successful in Europe. Why would you say it became a hit?

First and foremost, in the U.S., SingStar Rocks! shipped in November, it's done incredibly well, it's just been one SKU. In Europe, we're up to the sixth major iteration, multiple local language variations. Probably the the thing that most people even in the U.K. don't recognize is the broad variety of local language variations that we did. There's a Croatian version of SingStar Rocks! I think we're up to our 40th different build with different languages. If you're going to sell music in France, it has to be French. If you're going to sell music in Italy, it has to be Italian, and so on and so forth.

I believe the reason why SingStar has done so well versus Karaoke Revolution is very, very easy to articulate. I don't know why Alex was struggling over that. The reason is we had real performances--real recordings with the real original music videos--and they had sound-alikes.

I think Alex did point to the music video part of the equation.

Right, he did mention that. Also, having two microphones in the box made it instantly a social experience. In the first versions of Karaoke Revolution, I believe they only had one microphone. Also, their microphone didn't look like a real microphone. We invested a lot of time and effort into making the microphone look cool, and actually feel heavy as well. That meant it just felt like you were a proper rock star, or pop star, or whatever.

Looking at the flip side of this, Sony had previously done two music-based games with Harmonix. Why do you think Guitar Hero broke through in a way that Frequency and Amplitude didn't?

I think you can loosely collect Guitar Hero into the same social gaming genre as EyeToy, SingStar, Buzz!, Guitar Hero, the train driving simulator that Taito had in Japan--that'll do for now. They all have one thing in common: they eliminate the game console and the [Dual Shock] game controller from the gameplay experience. Now I've had people play SingStar 'round at my house, or who've played EyeToy 'round my house, who think they're playing with the television. They don't realize where the cable is being plugged into. They don't need to know how it works, they just have fun. We've all seen it where we hand a controller to somebody who doesn't play games and they instantly put it down because they feel like you've handed them some kind of dangerous weapon.

Like it's Kryptonite.

Yeah, exactly. It's like "Oh my god, am I going to drive off the side of the road and kill somebody?" "No, it's only a game. You're not going to kill anybody if you don't drive properly." So Guitar Hero, SingStar, Buzz!, EyeToy all did that very successfully. They completely democratized the gameplay experience. You don't have to know what X, Circle, Square, Triangle, L1 and L2 means, you just go [vocalizes the famous guitar riff from Deep Purple's "Smoke on the Water."] Transcribe that. [Laughs.]

That's going to be hard. I may have to do it as musical notation.

F F G...

When I look at some of the gamers who are expressing concern for the platform as it stands right now--the ones who aren't just haters, they want to know where that game, those games are that are going to blow the roof and show what PS3 is really about. During our onstage Q&A, I said that there's a certain amnesia among publishers and developers, and to a certain extent among the audience. Because if you look at the PS2 early on in North America, it was pretty much Madden at launch, and then you had ...

Fantavision. The Bouncer. Tekken Tag.

True.

And Ridge Racer V.

But for the most part, what people remember from the launch, over here anyway, is Madden and SSX. The next year, you had Onimusha, which was a big breakthrough. Then you had Zone of the Enders, with the Metal Gear Solid 2 demo, and even though a lot of people bought it for the demo, Zone of the Enders was certainly entertaining in its own right, Zone of the Enders 2 even moreso. Then you had NBA Street. So stuff started to appear. People tend to forget that it takes time for those things. But people still want that roof to be blown off. Past MotorStorm, what would you point to that's going to blow the roof off?

From our own studios, Warhawk, Lair, Heavenly Sword, the Naughty Dog game--the game with no name, at least not officially. I think those individually and collectively are going to resonate with gamers around the world, of a lot of obvious reasons. From third parties, I'm less qualified to comment, because I just don't have the exposure, but definitely Metal Gear Solid 4, definitely Final Fantasy XIII, I'm hearing about some interesting things from Sega--

The reviews for Virtua Fighter 5 have been great.

Right. So I think everybody just needs to relax. It's okay. It's okay.

It's going to happen.

Yeah. it is happening. I guess I'm not allowed to mention *****Storm again.

BleepStorm.

BleepStorm, yeah. The game is being overlooked already and it hasn't even launched. It's the most downloaded thing off the Playstation Network. Some enormous percentage who have a connected console have downloaded that demo. People are loving what they're getting on the demo. I don't know whether you've seen the final code, but have you played online?

No, not online.

See, the online mode is an absolute hoot. Now--same as Resistance--we're going to have additional content packs available for it, and we're make some new gameplay modes available. We're going to keep that alive, keep that growing, keep building a community on top of that. And as you said earlier about the forums, that's our great feedback loop. We read those forums, we read those posts about people wanting to have this feature and that feature.

Now, to your point that everyone should just relax. I realize that this may be asking you to go very far outside of your bailiwick. The older I get, the more I take a binary approach to things. Either various hardware issues get fixed, or they don't. Either the software's there or it's not. But the one thing that's cloudy, and that I can't tell in what direction it's headed, is the flow of information out of Playstation. Between E3 2005 and TGS [Tokyo Game Show] 2006--and even later, honestly--there was a big information gap, an information vacuum, about the PS3. And into that vacuum came speculation, rumor, FUD from some of the competition. In the absence of information from Sony, things got whipped up into a frenzy, and a big chunk of it was negative.

Even going up to and including the media event in San Francisco in the fall, there were certain things that were expected to be there or assumed to be there and they weren't. One of those things was a unified identity across all games. Another one was the headset; at the event, you tossed off casually, "You can use your existing Bluetooth headset." But in the absence of dedicated information flow systems--and I'm biased because I'm a blogger, but I believe that blogs have a big role to play in this--I don't think that word about the headset reached a lot of people. I think a lot of people were genuinely mystified as to what the headset solution was for PS3. So if you were fortunate enough to be in the know, you got that information; if you weren't you didn't, and there was no official headset, obviously.

To me, that's Playstation's biggest challenge. Because I figure you guys know hardware, you know software--that's going to come together. I firmly believe that. Online, I'm a little bit less confident, but not that much less, because SOE [Sony Online Entertainment] and those guys are smart, and you know what you have to do to get there. But on the information flow side of things, I think that's a big reason for the agitation on the part of gamers. There's a lot they don't know. There's stuff they don't even know they don't know.

Right. Sounds like Donald Rumsfeld.

Yes. There are known unknowns. And I feel as though there are also a lot of unknown unknowns with the PS3.

[Laughs.] Fair point. No comeback on that. We did a very bad job between E3 2006 and the media event in October. And something which in hindsight I wished we had done--but that's 20/20 vision--I wished we had released a movie showing the Xross Media Bar in action to the Web after E3 2006. Not maybe showing every single feature, but just to give people something to chew on. Because it would have, I think, reassured an awful lot of people, like "Oh, there's a photo viewer in it," and things like that. We showed it in a very hard-to-reach room at E3. And even though it was there, and some people who bothered to queue up got the demo, I don't think we released anything moving as media. I think we released a few static screenshots. So that was an error.

In hindsight we should have done something about that, and we should have said, "Here's the photo mode viewer. Here's the music player. Here's the Blu-Ray player. Here's the network functionality. Here's the Web browser. And I think we would have addressed head-on a lot of that. Now, we didn't. It's interesting, when we were setting up for the technical rehearsal [for our public Q&A at the D.I.C.E. Summit in Las Vegas] on Wednesday, one of the crew came up to me and said, "I've never seen a Playstation 3 in action before in terms of the visuals. I'm going to buy a PS3. It's amazing. I never thought it would look that good. And he was an Xbox 360 guy, a hardcore gamer. He asked me if I was going to be showing Halo. [Laughs.]

Based on what you're saying about what you might have done differently, do you an other people at Sony now feel that the undertaking of PS3--not just from a hardware level, not just from a software level, but also on an information and communication level--was far more complicated than even you predicted. Because--and you and I have had this conversation before--when you take E3 2006 for PS3 and compare it to E3 2005 for Xbox 360, in terms of playable software, yours was better. There was more playable software for PS3 that was available right after your press conference; it looked better, played better, all of that. At the event in San Francisco, there were key things that were shown. But because of the design of today's consoles, there's so much more connective tissue, and the informed consumer has so much more interest and investment in those devices.

Right.

So when I think about PS3--and you know that I'm an avid user of PSP; it kind of goes with me wherever I go--there are still nagging questions. I know I can change my wallpapers on my PSP, and the interfaces of PSP and PS3 are similar even though what's under the hood is different, so am I eventually going to be able to change the wallpaper on my PS3, or is that an executive decision from [Playstation chairman] Ken Kutaragi that this is the perfect object and it won't change? There are RSS feeds on PSP; why are they not available on PS3? And vice versa: there's predictive text entry on the PS3 implementation of data entry, but there isn't on PSP. Why not, when it's probably more needed there? There are all of these nagging issues, and I don't have any visibility into what Sony's priorities are. That's what I mean when I say there's a vacuum. I believe that the games will come eventually, but there's so much more connective tissue now, and the information challenge that you have is as complex, if not moreso, than the software and hardware challenge.

I think that's a very fair comment. And I share that frustration. Because there are times when I get a firmware upgrade, and I'm like, "Oh. I didn't know we were doing that." That's my fault for probably being on an airplane too much, but if I'm experiencing that in a tiny little way, it's going to be amplified even more for somebody like yourself, or a consumer.

We are under no illusions as to the complexity of the challenge. I think what you've touched upon is actually the thing that we wrestle with internally. Our engineers in Japan are unrivaled in their ability. I have unbelievable respect for what they have pulled off from a hardware point of view, a software point view, an operating system point of view, how robust the machine is. I'm sure a lot of people had already written the story about PS3s being returned for some hardware problem. There is no hardware problem. So I'm sure a lot of people were like, "Damn!"

[Laughs.] I'm sure there were some people in Redmond saying that.

Right. The fact that the Playstation 3 experience, which is exponentially more complicated than a PS2 or a PS1, works, does what it says, every time, efficiently, effectively--it's a fantastic achievement.

Part IV: In the final installment of our Q&A, Harrison discusses which cultural aspects of his company's Japanese division must change; his grudging respect for PSP hackers like dark_alex; and even brainstorms a title for an Amplitude sequel--if one were to ever come about.