This interview was originally published in the January 1997 issue of Edge (E41).

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The company line

It's great for gamers, but what is Sony getting from Yaroze? Edge went to Sony Computer Entertainment America's Foster City headquarters to find out...

Edge spoke to Sony VP of thirdparty development and R&D Phil Harrison, VP of marketing Andrew House and VP of R&D Bill Rehbock to get Sony's perspective on Yaroze.

Edge: Explain the reasoning behind the system.

Phil Harrison: Philosophically, videogame systems are closed systems that don't allow the consumer to play around and do things with software. And so you could argue that the last time the consumer has been able to do that was with the Commodore 64 and Appple IIgs, which means that there is a whole generation of consumers who have an interest in getting involved in the sort of gritty side of development but can't do it.

Edge: Well, you can do that on the PC...

PH: But the PC is costly and complicated and is a moving target, so your average consumer is going to find it very difficult to get involved with. One of the reasons for producing this program was to bring back the good old days of home development – the idea of hobby development, of two friends in the garage or in the spare room coming up with the next Boulderdash. Obviously, there are huge benefits subsequent to that, namely that the industry gets a whole load of newly trained PlayStation programmers who are moving into the thirdparty community or even working for us.

Edge: Do you realistically expect that the next Boulderdash, or Doom, will come out of a garage?

PH: Well, 'Why not?' is, I guess, the answer to that! If you look at some of the seminal games of all time, they are one-man enterprises. From Peter Molyneux sitting on his own developing Populous to Will Wright's Sim City or Sid Meier's Civilization, you know, these were all one-man enterprises. So why shouldn't the next great game be developed in this way?

Edge: And of course, Sony will retain the exclusive rights to Yaroze-developed games...

PH: Well, not necessarily. We can't deny that that's an opportunity for us. But similarly, there is opportunity for the thirdparty software companies to start working with these people as well. And yet, if we see the next Sim City or the next Populous, we're going to be falling over ourselves to work with these people and to help make the game into a fully-fledged commercial product. But that's not the only reason we are doing this.

There is a whole other business model out there for people to make money from perhaps getting involved with a compilation disk that we would do as a 'best of' from this program. I guess you could also call Yaroze job training – so people can learn enough to go get a job at some hot startup company and make their millions on the stock market ten years from now.

Edge: Just how big do you estimate demand for Yaroze will be in terms of unit sales?

PH: No idea, nor does it matter. The infrastructure to support one user or 20,000 is exactly the same. This is not PlayStation 2. This is not a massmarket consumer proposition. But it is a highly strategic initiative that reaps the reward three years down the line. It does not really matter how big it is.

Edge: What's the best-case scenario for Yaroze?

PH: I think the best thing would be a situation where Edge reviews a game, you give it a fantastic score and in interviewing the programmer, he confesses that this game actually started out when he was a member of the development community and he took it to xyz company and they said, 'This is great. Here's a job. Come work as part of a team and build your masterpiece into a fully-fledged consumer product.' That would be the dream.

I think that there is another benefit or another dream, which would be that there are legions of programmers coming into the marketplace creatively and technically trained on PlayStation. Obviously, it benefits our thirdparty programme for many, many years to come. So it's kind of like an insurance policy in that way.

In a perverse way, I want to see code listings in Edge. Typing in stuff from magazines. That's the same concept. I got my start in videogames by typing in listing of games from magazines. I learned to program by screwing around with them and saying, 'This doesn't work, but what about this?' It would be great to see code examples in little routines printed in magazines.

Edge: Why call it Yaroze?

Andrew House: It's a Japanese slang expression for 'Let's create!' It was a tagline used for just about everything in the early PlayStation marketing.

PH: I think it embodies the creative empowerment that this program is all about, which is, 'Okay Mr Gameplayer, you've always sat at home and said, 'I could do better than that.' You know, 'This game sucks, I know I could do better than that.' We're saying, 'Well, here you are, go do it!'

Edge: Will SCEA be pursuing educational opportunities with Yaroze?

PH: Oh yes, absolutely. A logical outlet for this product is into computer graphics and computer science courses at varying educational levels, be it the master's degree level or moving down to vocational training and technical colleges. We'll have a mechanism for government and educational establishments to buy systems.

Edge: How much will Yaroze change the impression of PlayStation in the eyes of the man on the street – perhaps someone who has no intention of ever actually buying one?

AH: I think that it will certainly enhance the overall brand image of PlayStation. I think that it lends an air of creativity to the platform. It obviously shows we are forward-looking and that we are setting up plans for the future. I think there is a lot of positive impact to be had.

I also think that there will be significant interest from general consumers as to what's developed there and I think that you create a very positive spiral because you have people who are creating their own stuff and want other people to look at it and you'll have a significant number of interested consumers who will be very keen to see how it's emerging.

PH: I think that knowing that this particular game was created by 'one of us' has some appeal. Empowerment is a very compelling hook for our target consumer. And so knowing that you can do this with a PlayStation, even if you yourself are not going to do it or don't have the skills or the inclination, just knowing that PlayStation is capable of this, is a very compelling part of the brand ethos. the thing that makes PlayStation what it is. And I think that will become stronger as time goes on.

Bill Rehbock: The other thing that you are going to see is that people will be seeing the realisation of their wishes. If a guy is up on a website saying, 'Boy, it would be really cool if a game like X existed,' who's more likely to pick up on it and do it, Virgin or a member? No member is going to say, 'Okay, we'll get a focus group to check it out, and run it past the Midwest sales manager.' They'll just do it and upload it to the website.

Edge: How do you expect distribution and creation to work?

PH: I think that what we are expecting to see is that along with the executable program, the source goes up as well. And a lot of people will say, 'This is how I did it.' Then I expect two or three people to band together and say, 'Let's work on a masterpiece. You do this section of the game, and we will do this bit, and my mate down at USC is going to do the graphics.'

BH: One thing that we have seen in Japan is that we have members who are not programmers or artists but designers who have good ideas. They get together with the programmers and artists and say, 'Here is this diamond in the rough, but it'd be really cool if you did this and this and this.' Then someone else says, 'You know that programmer art really sucks,' and contributes art to it. So that we have these titles that are in incubation, that have scattered development members and wow – it's 1975 all over again.

PH: Yaroze is almost the perfect Internet application in that respect. You can work with people you've never met in different countries, where you never have any realtime interaction with them. I think that's the collective ideal of this, and it's something which is completely out of our control. And that's the appeal of it! There are no content guidelines, there's no approval process, there is no requirement that the product fulfill certain taste or commercial requirements. Because this is not a retail program. Full products going onto shelves are sensitive to the dynamics of the marketplace, because there are only so many linear feet of shelf space in stores. But with this, the shelf space is infinite. It's virtual shelf space. So people can go and do what they like, and they don't even have to be games. They don't just have to be for a typical target demographic. They can be all kinds of weird and wonderful things, and that's part of the appeal – what are these people going to come up with?

Edge: What about the RAM? Is 2 MB enough to create a great title in?

PH: Well, it's 3.5 if you include the 1 MB of VRAM and half a meg of sound RAM. So that's a lot if you think that Ridge Racer is the benchmark. Most users don't have a CD-ROM burner and an SGI to create 15-minute rendered intros, so we don't think it's a problem. It also puts the focus on the idea rather than the production. On commercial software, where you're charging 50 bucks for the product, the focus is on the production values and production quality to justify the price. This doesn't have those kind of commercial dynamics applied to it. And so you can have a really really simple idea that would never stack up on a store shelf. But it is an absolutely boiled-down, refined, well-formed concept. One of the things we will do is look at these pure concepts and evaluate them and go, 'Wow that would make a fantastic product', and work with the creator to turn it into something great.

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