Studio Profile
The Sony game makers striving to make innovation part of the furniture
Inside SIE London Studio, the Sony outfit striving to make innovation part of the furniture
Sony’s largest internal development studio is also perhaps its most experimental. It might sound like a counterintuitive approach for the PlayStation giant to encourage, but it’s done good business: SIE London Studio is responsible for mainstream hits such as the EyeToy and SingStar series, as well as the Wonderbook augmented-reality peripheral and VR sampling menu PlayStation VR Worlds.
Its creative endeavours in software have always been intertwined with Sony’s hardware. Now at the forefront of SIE London Studio’s future plans, PlayStation VR is a fine project for a team that has always produced magic from unexpected places.
Indeed, the beginnings of the studio would set the tone. Originally Team Soho, it began to accumulate new talent in 2000, most of the recruits university graduates with little to no experience. Tara Saunders, today the studio’s head of operations, was one of them. She had her sights set on becoming an animator, and had already interviewed at the BBC earlier the same day she first visited London Studio. “But when I saw the technology involved in game-making, how it really brought the art and tech worlds together, that was the thing that really inspired me.” As an animator on ambitious GTAIII homage The Getaway, she was soon dashing around London with her team members, taking photos of its buildings in order to recreate the city in-game. “There were a lot of people that didn’t have preconceptions about what making a game was like,” she says. “Having people that can think fresh things, and not just do what everybody else has done, means that there’s a lot of technical and creative challenges and you need people whose minds are open to that. Like, ‘Okay, the rulebook isn’t set, how do we write it?’”
It was a time of change for Sony: Studio Camden and Team Soho merged in 2002 (the company had done the sums on running two small operations just around the corner from each other in pricey districts) to form London Studio. PS2’s popularity, meanwhile, meant that the dev scene exploded: new studios headhunted talent from diverse creative industries, which resulted in countless unique and experimental games. “I think every project that we’ve done since has had something new about it,” Saunders says. Thanks in part to the security and trust afforded by the Sony mothership, not only was London Studio pioneering new mocap technologies and processes, it was also getting used to approaching challenges in a more abstract way – say, when presented with a bizarre new digital
camera device and asked to create a game for it. “That’s definitely been the heritage of the studio,” she says, pointing to the original brainstorming sheets for EyeToy: Play on display in a nearby cabinet. One of them bears a hastily scribbled thought: ‘Imagine that the human is the controller’.
And the development relationship worked the other way too. “The SingStar microphones came from the team coming up with, ‘What do we do with audio inputs?’” Saunders says. “Once
“THERE’S A LOT OF TECHNICAL AND CREATIVE CHALLENGES AND YOU NEED PEOPLE WHOSE MINDS ARE OPEN”
you’ve got audio input going into the PC, it’s like, ‘Okay, so we’re going to do a singing game – to really feel like a pop star, you need to hold the microphone’. And so that was led almost the other way around.” (Later still, when PSVR was in development as Project Morpheus, London Studio’s team would be regularly feeding back to Morpheus’ hardware team, inputting into the headset’s design and functionality.)
It was during her work on EyePet that Saunders began to see how she could best drive the studio forward. As the art manager, she collaborated closely with the core creative portion of the team while managing the people side of things, and increasingly found herself taking on more team organisation and development projects as a sideline to her day job. It was clear that the hugely important people-focused side of studio life was being underserved. “And then the other big kickstarter was actually the refit, which was a few years ago now,” she tells us. Our visit aptly demonstrates the ambience that Saunders has worked hard to cultivate. The marketing
focused side of the building is abuzz with Sony employees and visitors, casual but undeniably glam, the colourful bar stools and neon signage of its lobby/canteen area giving the impression of a grown-up student union.
But out of the revolving doors into the city, and a short walk down the street, the development building couldn’t feel more different. It’s quieter, with ragtag souvenirs from the development of cult hit games propped up in cabinets by desks. A small kitchen leads into a lounge-like space with low-slung sofas. It feels more like a home than an office. But it wasn’t always this way. “It came from interviewing people,” Saunders says, “Them coming into the building, and me going, ‘Oh, we’ve got some work to do’ – apologising is the wrong word, but feeling like the building wasn’t reflective of who we wanted to be.” That was the catalyst that led Saunders to pitch her current job to Sony’s then-head of Europe, Michael Denny. “I said, ‘I’d like to do this moving forward. I want to head up the studio ops team, have a management team of three people, and I’ll look after the bits that fall in between – the people, environment and culture for the studio.’
“I think London Studio historically has been quite buried within the corporate mothership of PlayStation,” she continues. ”It’s easy to get lost unless you have your own identity and culture. I looked at Media Molecule, Guerrilla, Naughty Dog, and I thought, ‘We’re not doing as much as they are’. I saw the team setups that they had, and I said, ‘This is what we need to be the most successful studio we can be’.” With Liz Wyle as executive producer on one side, and head of VR product development Stuart Whyte on the
other, London Studio has a management structure that means Saunders can focus on ensuring the studio culture reflects its goals: of championing weird and wonderful hardware, and working out how it might fit into people’s lives and homes.
Wonderbook was one such memorable attempt, using augmented reality markers in a book-like peripheral to tell stories on-screen via PS3 and PlayStation Eye Camera. Saunders recalls setting it up for a meeting with Sony Pictures in a hotel room in LA, and calling a maintenance person to the room to get the television input to work. “The book was there on the table in front of the camera. And suddenly on the TV screen, this thing popped out of the book. And the hardware guy went ‘Oh my god, what was that?’ We closed it down, like, ‘Nothing to see here!’” she laughs. “And it was such a moment. Doing something magical out of unexpected things – it’s always been that for us.”
VR is presently the big focus. In-game metrics from PlayStation VR Worlds, released in 2016, showed how long players tended to stay in the headset, and which of its many playstyles they’d repeatedly return to. Gangster action sim The London Heist was by far the most played. Blood & Truth is its spiritual successor, an attempt to create a true triple-A virtual-reality game and system seller – and push the studio to the next level. “London Studio has got a rich history of some amazing games,” Whyte tells us. “But actually, there haven’t been any triple-A-type experiences since The Getaway. And I know that Michael and the leadership team were keen to kind of reinvent the studio, because of the success of VR Worlds, because of the potential the medium was showing, as to basically not do the smaller titles any more.” Whyte’s background working on games such as Fable made him a natural fit for this new era of London Studio: after Lionhead shuttered in 2016, his efforts to start his own Guildford-based studio brought him into Sony’s path, and the rest is history.
“One of the challenges that we have is that if you look at our sister studios, boy, that’s some competition,” he laughs. “Putting microphones or augmented reality, or cameras in the mix, you get to do stuff that is super-creative and innovative. But there was definitely a desire from the studio to do something big, and feel that we could stand at least a little bit more shoulder-to-shoulder with our sister studios.” London Studio is wedded to VR now, and its future plans generally revolve around the headset (although it’s also exploring live-action technologies in games, offering support to Erica maker Flavourworks). What happens to London Studio should the VR bubble burst? “A few months ago, I went out for dinner with Shuhei Yoshida and Shawn Layden,” Whyte says. “And Shawn was talking about how, historically, Sony would place bets on things – I’m not going to name those things because I don’t want to be specific.
“It’s like, you’ve got £1,000 in your pocket. You walk up to a roulette table, you put the money on the table, you win or you lose. You lose, you’re like, ‘That isn’t going to work’, and walk away. In the past there have definitely been times where we’ve experimented with something that hasn’t worked, so we shut it down. But from the very top of the organisation, there is something of, like, ‘There’s something here with VR’. All hardware has limitations – but there is something here that, if we don’t keep investing, keep playing on that roulette table, somebody else is going to come along and win big.”
Sony’s set to keep investing in VR, then, and London Studio is a natural fit to lead exploration into the new medium. It’s achieved remarkable things with Blood & Truth, including a 3D audio mechanic that adjusts the orchestra-to-grime ratio of the soundtrack according to how well you’re playing, and a recreation of the London skyline that stitches together drone photos, UK government data and even photos taken for The Getaway. “It’s amazing being in the heart of London in that regard,” Whyte says. “And obviously London’s a real cultural melting pot, too: about a third of our studio are European nationals, so we’ve got a
“PUTTING MICROPHONES OR AUGMENTED REALITY, OR CAMERAS IN THE MIX, YOU GET TO DO SUPER-CREATIVE STUFF”
real mix within the studio.” He laughs. “And when I worked at Lionhead, we were on the Surrey Research Park in Guildford – we had like three or four delivery options, and they were all shitty pizza and Chinese places. My first day at London Studio loading up Deliveroo, there were literally 400 delivery options on burgers alone.”
And while the commute and cost of living takes some of the shine off the convenience of having everything on your doorstep, working in one of London’s most vibrant creative districts is still a daily inspiration. “I commute in when the sun is rising,” Saunders says. “You’ve got this history and architecture all around you… You could be going to a factory and canning beans all day, or that kind of thing. But we’re making entertainment for people’s homes, in an amazing location. What’s not to enjoy about that?”