Below are some snippets of info that Sony has made available to Three Speech - with the info coming from head of worldwide studios, Phil Harrison.

Phil advises we don’t underestimate how big an entertainment company Sony actually is across film and music. For instance, he says Sony has access to 50% of all films made in colour - a statistic that may quell unease among some over how much content will be available.

The online store on the PS3 will operate in real currency. Whether it be yen in Japan, pounds in England or dollars over in the US etc. There will be a limit function that allows restrictions to be placed on the wallet this may be on general spending, individual transactions or adult content.

Also, niche content will become available when specific software has been purchased. Therefore, once you have purchased you’re copy of GTHD you will be able to access a range of options that those without the game will not have.

Remote play. On release in the US and Japan, you will be able use your PSP to view all of the content (film, music, video, photo, etc) uploaded onto your PS3. On launch in the US and Japan this function will only be available on local access. However, this will eventually open up, allowing you to access the content of your PS3 from anywhere in the world.

The Xross Media Bar of the PS3 is designed to allow for an unlimited number of files to be open at any one time. All of the content that is open is represented by an animated thumbnail which can be accessed instantly (with no loading time).

Hope that’s all of interest.

Here’s some more quotes from Phil Harrison which will appear in the official PlayStation mag which launches on November 15. We hope to get a further instalment of this online tomorrow.

When asked which game they’ll rely on to sell the PS3.

I think we saw this with the PS1 to a certain extent, that a lot of people talked about the killer app and actually its the killer catalogue you want. It’s not about having a single title like a Mario or a Sonic on which you rest the entire platform personality on. It’s about having a wide catalogue that satisfies a number of different consumer tastes and styles. If you’re a sports fan in America, NBA and NFL available from day one means you will buy a PS3. If you are a first-person shooter fan it’s going to be Resistance: Fall Of Man. If you are a more cerebral player it might be Untold Legends - or it might be Motorstorm if you’re more of an action and exhilaration fan. I think there’s something for everybody in there. The games are outstanding quality and I think will satisfy.

PS1 saw the shift to 3D, PS2 had the explosion of free-roaming games after GTA III what changes do you expect PS3 to trigger?

You can see sparks of change in individual games today. On the visual side, there’s full 1080p HD and what that means. You can see the artificial intelligence side of things in F1 and especially Resistance. You can start to see games doing some more interesting and unpredictable things on the physics side particularly the kind of chaotic experience you get with Motorstorm. You can join those dots together and start to see how game development trends are going to be influenced. Its understandable why, day one, there isn’t a single game that incorporates everything, but I think it will happen shortly.

What do you think is the most interesting use of the Sixaxis pad so far?

There’s a couple. The fake on NBA; if you want to fake past a player you just tilt left or right, that’s really intuitive. Flow is very intuitive, once you understand the control mechanism, which takes about three seconds. F1’s steering, looking around Resistance… We need to get thinking about the experience of a game and not the interface. I think that we’ll see the e-Distribution games making some really innovative uses of it.

Is rumble feedback really gone for good?

I’ve been very consistent on this. The rumble feature was a great, impactful way of the machine talking to the user on PS2. But you had no influence on it; you just received a single channel feedback from the game. Sixaxis gives you greater influence over the game environment, enabling you to do things you could never do with buttons and sticks alone. That will yield way more sophisticated gameplay benefits and therefore more value to the player than a vibrating pad could ever do. Saying that, I don’t believe we’ve got definitive examples of how great it could be yet, but we’re close.

If, further down the line, there was a way of marrying the two technologies, would Sony consider it?

No, because we’re making a standard controller. With the PS2 we made 160 million controllers. Once you’™ve defined the format, you stick to it. Now, that doesn’t prevent third party steering wheels having force feedback and obviously [Gran Turismo creator] Kazunori is going to be keen to have that. There will continue to be vertically integrated controllers like that, which a specific to an individual game.

Is there any way players could record their own gameplay footage on the hard drive and then share it online?

[Laughs] We’re actually already working on it now. There are two ways to do it. One is as pure video actually saved direct from the gameplay experience, but that creates quite a large data cloud. The more efficient way of doing it is to record game input and then share that to each user. We are doing that in a very innovative way on a game that we haven’t shown anybody yet.

How often do you expect PS3 firmware upgrades to happen?

Right now we are focused on day one. I would imagine that there would be a firmware upgrade in time for the European launch. European consumers will probably get a step-up firmware upgrade, exactly as we did with PSP.

Presumably the PlayStation Store will be well-stocked for the UK-launch, and we’ll have the benefit of the extra content?

Yes, although the stores are managed regionally, built on the same framework, you’re right. There will be greater supply of content and availability of non-game content.

Is there any way word on European price for the 20GB model?

We’ve never announced the price in the UK. The answer is no, but I’m sure it will be announced in due course. However, retail has told us that the vast majority of interest is in the 60GB model. But now the 20GB has HDMI as well there’s no effective difference in the machines whatsoever, because all of the other functionality is available through a USB card reader.

How’s Killzone coming along?

With Killzone, the expectation internally and externally is very high and I won’t show it until it’s going to exceed people’s expectations. It will be next year before we show it again, but it’s coming along very well. The team are working very hard, they know exactly what they have to do and there’s no doubt they will achieve it, but there’s nothing to be served by something that doesn’t satisfy my goals for the project. I can tell you, though, that some elements already exceed the trailer.

Can you describe the typical day on PlayStation network a year from now?

That’s a great question…Checking in with my clan to see what the plan is for tonight’s SOCOM or Resistance games. Searching out the latest trailers, downloadable demos, skins for my desktop. Downloading a new album, reading a fine editorial of Official PlayStation Magazine, watching stuff on YouTube that my friends emailed me about You only have to look at the Cross Media Bar to see how everything is going to fit into a Network environment. Obviously you’ve got your friend lists, the ability to chat directly with them, you’ve got your internet browser and the Store with downloadable games.

The UK’s official PlayStation mag is set to run an interview with Phil Harrison (street date for issue: November 15). Via PlayStation we’ve got hold of some excerpts. To repeat, it’s in the official mag but there is some interesting comment. We’ll load up some more excerpts in the near future if we can.

On asking if the PS3 will definitely be out in March in Europe

Given that all of our previous statements about launching in Europe simultaneously with the US and Japan turned out not to be the case, I would not like to make any definitive statements on that. It’s not my job to comment on hardware supply issues other than to say some very smart people are working very hard to catch up. In fact, the ramp up is already starting to happen in supply and output, just obviously too late for us to have launched in Europe at the same times as the US.

They ask what kind of deals are being lined up with music and video providers for the PlayStation Store

One of the strongest attributes of the PlayStation Store is that it is an open environment. It’s interesting that you ask what deals’ we are doing. We want other companies to provide their own content on the store through our commerce mechanism. Day one is clearly going to be more game-centric, but over time that will expand to music, film, television. Any digital content can be distributed this way. “

Will the PS3 browser let users visit any site and download files?

“No. It has to be done through the store. Although it’s built on the same technology as the open internet browser, it’s a special version. That’s completely understandable from a DRM [digital rights management] point of view. But some streaming sites, such as music on MySpace, will work.”

They ask how PlayStation will guarantee a regular flow of new downloadable content…

“You can imagine a game starting with a trailer to drive a bit of anticipation and to get people excited about it. Not dissimilar to the strategy where you’d see a preview in the magazine linked to the content on a disc. There is a role for linking your editorial to these kind of materials.”

Are they happy with the number of games that are exclusive to PS3?

“I’m delighted because we’re launching with a stronger line-up of first-party titles than we had with the launches of PS1, PS2 and PSP – and about a third of these are PS3 exclusive, which is a similar ratio to what we had in the past. The difference this time is that more have come out of Sony’s Worldwide Studios than before. Bearing in mind that we launched PS2 with Fantavision as a first party title – great game though it is – it’s by no means the game on which you would rest an entire format. But look as PS3 launching in America with Resistance, Genji, NBA in full HD and Motortorm. Plus an F1 demo available day one as a download and retail games coming out very shortly after the launch. That’s a pretty compelling line-up.”

Ken Kutaragi’s keynote speech at the Tokyo Game Show this year was, to put it mildly, a bit of an odd one - but there were two big pieces of news in there. One was a price drop for the 20GB PS3 in Japan, and the other, which affects the rest of the world a bit more, was the announcement that the 20GB model is also going to have a HDMI video connector, which was previously only intended for the 60GB model.

That’s good news, obviously - it means that if you buy the basic version of PS3, you can still hook it up to even the most high-end of flat-screen TVs and get the absolute best picture quality possible. On the other hand, isn’t it a bit late in the day to run around changing the specification of the machine?

Worldwide studios boss Phil Harrison admits that he doesn’t know exactly when the decision was made, but he can shed some light on the thinking behind it. “The reason for the change was in reaction to a market trend, which is that much more displays are being sold with HDMI, earlier, than had been previously forecast,” he explains to us. “Not just Sony, but all the other TV manufacturers.”

In fact, according to Harrison, the decision to move HDMI onto the basic model wasn’t really a surprise at all - it just happened faster than anyone expected. “Although we didn’t say it at E3, I think that the unspoken assumption was that we would always merge everything into HDMI eventually. We just made that decision earlier.”

That’s all very well but if you’re changing the spec of the machine just weeks away from launch, doesn’t that tend to imply that you haven’t actually started building the things yet? Which doesn’t bode well for stocks of the unit at launch (already projected to be thin on the ground, even despite the European delay into next March). According to Harrison, it’s not quite that simple.

“The criticial question,” he says, “is not ‘when do you start manufacturing’, but ‘when do you start assembly’. The HDMI port - whether it’s enabled or not on the machine is an assembly issue, not a manufacturing issue. The parts have been procured, clearly, in anticipation of this announcement. It’s not like we’re going to make a decision of that magnitude and then call up our suppliers and say, ‘oh, can we have a few more HDMI ports?’ Clearly this had been well planned.”

Well planned or not, it’s obvious that Sony has had some big problems with manufacturing. Looking past the question of the HDMI port to the bigger picture, it’s clear that with only 500,000 units available for launch and the European date pushed back four months, Sony has over-stretched itself. Isn’t that a bit, well, worrying?

Harrison nods. “There’s no denying that we’ve had some very public challenges,” he says. “Today, it looks like a very difficult situation - but in the weeks, months and years to come, this will pale into zero.”

“Yes, we have overreached in production of the Blu-Ray component - I can’t deny that. But that’s the price you pay for adopting brand new, leading-edge technologies that will be future proof. We will resolve those issues - we are already catching up. We will continue to catch up on the production, and as you know, we haven’t changed our full-year forecast of six million units, so we’re only talking about a ramp-up issue. We’re not talking about the fundamental design of the product itself.”

Taking the long view, there’s a ring of truth about that. Few consoles have launched without a fairly hefty dose of problems in the first few months - although for the god-knows-how-many people who expected to have a PS3 in their hands this Christmas and now almost certainly won’t, that won’t be much comfort in the next few months.

Now that we’re starting to get our hands on the PS3 launch titles in a little more depth, personal favourites are emerging. I’ve got friends who are all over Ridge Racer 7 like a rash; others are intrigued by MotorStorm’s ace physics and combative gameplay. It’s a good sign, I guess, that people are finding their own titles to fixate on rather than everyone pointing at one single launch title as being the pick of the bunch - or worse again, everyone sounding a universal “meh” sound and being uninterested by the lot. For me, though, the title to watch is Resistance: Fall of Man - a first person shooter which I initially wrote off as being a cynical attempt to make a World War 2 game by the numbers look interesting by adding aliens, but which looks more and more like a genuinely brilliant game every time I see it.

Today, then, I’m having a quick chat with Ted Price - the head of Insomniac Games, the company making Resistance. You might know them as the developers of Ratchet & Clank, and although Resistance is gritty and unrelenting, depicting an alternate history where real British towns and cities are under the control of a nasty extra-terrestial force in the late 1940s, you can still feel the influence of Ratchet in the game’s weapons. The team has really cut loose with the PS3’s physics capability, giving us a host of really interesting weapons we’ve never seen in a game before - many of which, Price claims, couldn’t have been done at all on the PS2, because they rely so heavily on working out the physics of hundreds of individual bullets, spikes or particles.

That being said - isn’t Price worried that most people will just dismiss the game as yet another WW2 shooter, which is exactly what I did when I first saw it? Apparently not.

“The fact that we set it in Great Britain is a big clue for people that this is not a World War II game,” he explains, “because in World War II, there wasn’t a lot of fighting in Great Britain! Secondly, the Chimera have a greater and greater influence on the environment as you move through the game - and even though we’ve shown some settings that are more terrestrial, there are plenty of Chimeran structures that set it apart from any other first person shooter out there, especially those that are World War II shooters.”

“Finally,” Price continues, “we make a big point in the story to emphasise the difference between this time period and previous time periods - in particular, with the technology that we present. You’ll notice that we have VTOLs [Vertical Take Off and Landing aircraft] flying around - that’s the standard mode of transportation in this world. Those didn’t exist in our world until the 1990s perhaps, the 1980s? That freedom of creating very different technology was one of the great aspects of working with this alternate history - and I think that as people play the game, they’re going to feel that it’s a very different setting.”

One of the interesting things about Resistance, from a gamers point of view, is that it doesn’t look like a launch title - which in general are games that are a bit rough and ready, with graphics that don’t take advantage of the hardware, not much in the way of content and loads of bugs. By contrast, Resistance is a really polished game - the kind of thing you expect to see a year after a console launches, not the day it comes out. So did Sony play favourites and give Insomniac access to hardware before all the other studios, or something?

“Not necessarily,” Price says, “but we worked closely with Sony at the very beginning to understand what the architecture was going to be all about. We participated in that early aspect of development, before we even had dev stations. As a result, we were able to get ready for when those dev stations came - so as soon as we got the dev stations, we jumped on it, and we had our levels up and running very quickly. We began building assets long before we got PlayStation 3 development stations.”

He pauses and thinks for a second. “The other thing to keep in mind,” he says, “is that we’ve been on PlayStation hardware now for over ten years, and I think our team of engineers is used to how Sony develops hardware. Even though the Cell and the PlayStation 3 are very, very different from PlayStation 2 and PlayStation, there’s a certain design sensibility that you get in terms of working with the hardware. Sony, for example, their hardware allows you to get very close to the metal - and our guys are used to working at a very low level and really squeezing a lot of power out of these machines. So, they were probably more ready because of our experience on the previous Sony platforms than had we not worked on PSone and PS2.”

Aside from the singleplayer campaign, Resistance also has extensive multiplayer support - both four-way split-screen, and online play for up to 40 players. Online games are hosted on servers provided by Sony, and Price claims that the team has experimented with 40 player matches involving gamers from locations as far afield as the United States, Spain and Japan, with near-perfect gameplay experienced between those countries. The game also has a built in buddy list, support for clans with up to 200 members, and the ability to form temporary parties who join a match as a group, thus simplifying the process of getting all your pals into the same game. However, disappointingly, it won’t hook into the main buddy list of the PlayStation 3 - instead you’ll need to build your own buddy list which is specific to the game. Price wouldn’t be drawn on whether this will be fixed by a future update to the game, but he made a point of saying that the buddy lists are separate “currently”, and said that “it is definitely possible to update the game via online” - so perhaps there’s hope on that front.

Finally, we leave Price with a question about the locations in the game - which takes in action from cities including York, Manchester, Grimsby (yes, Grimsby - “it had a great fish cannery,” Price explains cryptically), Nottingham and London, plus quite possibly a few more. “We actually went over to England - one of our artists went over and took a lot of photographs of all the places that we built,” Price explains.

“We also used maps of the era. For instance, if you go into Manchester, you’ll notice that the Manchester cathedral is there, the bridge leading to the cathedral is there… It was all based on real maps of the areas. Also, London is in the game, but it’s very different because it has a lot of the older structures that we believe would have existed had World War II never occurred in real life. So, it does look different to what you see today - it’s not quite as modern, simply because it never had a chance to be modernised.”

All of which, as a Londoner, just leaves me all the more keen to see the game in its final form. When all’s said and done about the hardware, PS3 will - like any console - live or die on the strength of its games; and Resistance is definitely one to watch to get a feel for what developers are starting to accomplish on the hardware.

We’ve published several excerpts from our interview with Phil Harrison talking about the PS3 hardware - but what of the machine’s software? He’s the head of Sony’s worldwide studios, so he should know a thing or three about that…

One of the most interesting things about the next-gen consoles is that they all give the option of downloading games from the network, rather than going into a store and buying them. They’re not the same games as you’ll be buying in boxes - instead they’re small, cheap, and sometimes very innovative games that are limited in scope but often incredibly good fun.

Of course, since all the consoles offer this option, it would be easy for all of them to end up offering the same stuff - and the PlayStation Store, which is accessible through PS3, will almost certainly share some of its range of retro games and the likes with its rivals. However, Sony is planning to make sure that PlayStation Store also has lots of interesting, exclusive games - and Harrison is the man spearheading that initiative.

“We announced an initiative from a worldwide studios perspective at GDC this year,” he explains, “as a call to action to the development community to encourage them to create games specifically for us, that we would fund, that we would publish, in the online sense of the word, and distribute online.”

In other words, Sony is - right now - paying for developers to come up with cool new downloadable games.

“We’re developing about 40 products that fit that strategy right now,” Harrison continues. “We showed the very first one of those, called flOw, at the Tokyo Game Show for the first time. That got a really, really good response.”

“My strategy was to encourage developers to push the machine technically, creatively, artistically - to innovate in lots of different ways. But don’t be restricted by ghettoising games into a particular genre, or a particular display mechanic, because what we’ve seen on other systems tend to be retro 2D games, and we’re pushing the 3D capabilities of the PlayStation 3. Plus, the fact that every PS3 has a hard disc drive means that we’re not restricted by the size of the download, and that has a huge impact on the kind of game design that you can do.”

Indeed, developers do seem to be particularly excited about this idea - and we know for a fact that in the UK alone, studios devoted entirely to developing PS3 downloadable games and new divisions of existing studios focusing purely on PS3 downloadable games have been set up in recent months.

Harrison confirms that downloadable games are definitely starting to take hold. “We’re seeing an emerging strength in developers creating games specifically for downloadable content,” he says. “We’re seeing that as a really interesting way of stimulating creativity, experimentation… And it makes me feel as excited as about the games that we saw at the beginning of PS1, when there was a lot of really interesting innovation happening in the marketplace. I think we’ll see that on PlayStation 3 as well.”

Last time we posted an excerpt from our chat wit Sony’s worldwide studios boss Phil Harrison, he told us about his views on the controversial Blu-Ray drive. This time out, we asked him about another hotly debated topic - the new control pad, which looks much like a wireless version of the old DUAL SHOCK 2 pad, but actually lacks the very feature which gave that pad its name, namely the rumble motor. Instead, it packs in a system which can sense how you’re tilting and moving the pad - hence the new name, SIXAXIS.

That’s all very well, but players accustomed to the rumble functionality for nearly ten years were outraged when Sony dropped the feature. So has the company had second thoughts about the decision to ditch rumble?

“None whatsoever,” Harrison tells us firmly. “Not at all.”

Well, that’s confident. So what makes him so certain that the SIXAXIS pad is better than its predecessor, despite lacking the force feedback?

“I think that the next generation interfaces that can be created built on SIXAXIS motion sensitivity give tremendous gameplay benefits that far outweigh a reactive vibration function,” he explains. “The vibration function is the game sending a single channel of feedback to the player - six axis of input puts the player in control in a much richer, deeper way. So, game design can go in much more interesting directions as a result of that than from receiving a single input from the game itself.”

Fair enough, but there’s a rather obvious counter-point to that - couldn’t Sony have built both rumble and motion sensing into the same pad? A company called Immersion, which makes rumble and force feedback technology, fanned the flames of controversy by pointing out that contrary to mutterings from Sony, this is perfectly possible, technically - so why doesn’t the SIXAXIS pad make everyone happy by doing both things?

“I think the caveat to that statement always has to be based on the fact that when we make a pad, we’re making maybe 150, 200 million of them,” Harrison tells us. “So it has to be done at a price, and it has to be done at a volume that fits our production requirements. I think the decision that we’ve made to build in the SIXAXIS functionality, and Bluetooth wireless, and great battery life, and all the other functionality that comes with it, far outweighs the chatter that we’re getting on vibration. And, it’s incredibly light! Just pick it up!”

Whatever about the questions of cost and volume - granted, it’s nice to see a straight answer on that front, and we’d rather not see hugely expensive controllers on the system, but a lot of players might be happy to pay a premium to get rumble back - he’s certainly got a point about the weight of the pad. Picking it up, it’s feather-light - so much so that we’d be convinced that it was just a hollow plastic model, if we hadn’t been playing MotorStorm with it only minutes previously. It feels great to hold and play games with - but only individual gamers will be able to judge if they’re happy with the shake and rattle being sacrificed for the roll.

By Rob Fahey (Eurogamer.net)

If it wasn’t for Ken Kutaragi, there would have been no PlayStation. The games industry legend, whose job title is President and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment (so there’s no doubting that he’s the head honcho) is known as “the father of the PlayStation”. For good reason: an electronic engineer by trade, he designed the original PlayStation and much of the PS2, PS3 and PSP.

Despite his incredibly lofty status, Kutaragi in person is surprisingly approachable and open. Although it’s not often that you get to see him in person, as he’s one of the world’s busiest men. A naturally smiley and sunny chap, he used to have a penchant for Chairman Mao jackets, which now seems to have given way to sharp charcoal suits. Coincidentally, that was exactly what he was wearing, when we managed to accost him for ten minutes or so, at a PS3 showcase event held after the first day of the Tokyo Games Show. Taking place at Sony’s incredibly impressive central Tokyo HQ (apparently, Kutaragi’s office overlooks the Royal Palace), we joined the press scrum that surrounded him, and got the chance to ask a handful of questions… maybe down to Ken’s broken English, or our poor hearing, some of the answers came as a bit of a surprise.

Q: Surely the next generation of consoles will have no disks, but use streaming media?

KK: With the next generation, that may well be right (laughs).

Q: What PlayStation 3 games will be on sale at launch in Japan?

KK: There will be approximately 20 games on sale at launch.

Q: Have you announced which ones?

KK: No, because a lot of the titles are still going through QA (Quality Assurance), and we have to speak to our third parties, in order to determine which of their titles will be ready for launch as well.

Q: And there will definitely be games with an online component on sale at launch?

KK: Yes, we’re trying to include online elements into all of our launch titles, and are encouraging the 3rd parties to do the same.

Q: Do you think the PS3 will outsell the Xbox 360 and the Wii?

KK: We don’t care.

***We spoke to Sony about this response, as it seemed a pretty ballsy statement to make, especially in light of how they’re being perceived (arrogant, out of touch, losing the battle etc.) by press and consumers alike at the moment.

They told us that what Ken will have meant is that, while they have a great deal of respect for the ‘competition’, they have always worked to their own business plan. In essence, regardless of what anyone else does, they’ll be sticking to their original plan where PS3 is concerned and won’t be changing things, just because company A does this, or company B does that. So there you go!***

Q: Do you think the PS3 will have a longer life-cycle than those consoles?

KK: Because we implanted a lot of new & cutting-edge technology in the PlayStation 3, it will have a long life – Future-proof, this is the answer.

Q: Were you surprised by the bad publicity Sony received after E3?

KK: I want to ask you (laughs). It always happens. When we released the PlayStation and even the PlayStation 2, I didn’t see any favourable articles. Press coverage always said: “PlayStation will fail,” or: “We have lost our momentum,” and blah blah blah. But we have lots of passion and confidence in both the PlayStation 3 hardware, and the software titles being produced for it.

Q: After the launch period, how many PlayStation 3s will you manufacture per month?

KK: The target is one million per month. But right now, we are making tiny amounts for the launch, because of the blue laser diode problem. We clearly need to catch up – but are still confident that we can meet our projected 6 million shipment figure by the end of the financial year.

Q: Is the blue laser diode manufacturing problem fixed now?

KK: Right now, it is an issue, because we can’t manufacture enough blue laser diodes for enough PlayStation 3s. But we will resolve that, and then question becomes how many PlayStation 3s we will be able to market.

Q: How important for Sony is it that Blu-ray is a success?

KK: It is important not just for Sony, but for the movie, component, software developer and even the TV industry. The PS3 has a perfectly nice graphics capability, allowing non-compression and high frame-rates, so it works well together with BD. Every manufacturer releasing flat-panel displays – not only Sony, but the likes of Panasonic, Samsung and Sharp – everyone is now welcoming PlayStation 3 and applauding today’s announcement about HDMI features.

Q: So how important is it that Blu-ray beats HD-DVD?

KK: It is important. Personally, I love Blu-ray, because Blu-ray has higher capacities than HD-DVD. Also it has a better bit-rate, which allows a differentiation in picture quality. So, right now, while the PC manufacturers are supporting HD-DVD, it is clear that current PCs cannot pick out the specification of Blu-ray using current CPUs. This is the main reason why the HD-DVD picture quality is not sexy enough. So we only have the PS3.

Q: But surely, you can only really tell the difference between Blu-ray and HD-DVD on a progressive-scan TV?

KK: On any TV, you can distinguish the difference.

We hooked up Rob Fahey from Eurogamer.net with Sony’s head of worldwide studios, Phil Harrison, for a long and intense interview that will lead to a whole series of pieces to be published on Three Speech. Here’s the first, with Phil Harrison talking PS3 hardware.

If you were going to pick somewhere to work, this wouldn’t be a bad choice. We’re in a modern office near Oxford Circus in London, with tall glass windows all down one side which look out over the rooftops of Soho; in the distance, the London Eye turns slowly. Perhaps even more distracting than the view, though, is the giant plasma screen which dominates the office - and the PlayStation 3 which sits underneath it. Lots of offices in London have great views of the river or the city’s landmarks - very few, right now, have great views of Ridge Racer 7, which is what’s on screen at the moment.

We’re in Phil Harrison’s office, and we’re here to talk about the PS3. Sony may be a Japanese company at heart, but if you’ve got questions about the forthcoming console and its software, this is the right place to come. Since he was appointed as head of Sony’s worldwide studios - the guy in charge of software, in other words - Harrison has become the company’s straight talker. There are plenty of people you can talk to if you want visionary, non-specific babble about the entertainment systems of the future. You talk to Phil Harrison if you want a straight answer about why the hell Sony is insisting on a Blu-Ray drive for PS3, or what they were thinking when they dropped rumble from the pad.

So we ask those things…

First things first. Blu-Ray, the disc system which the PS3 uses, is probably the most controversial aspect of the console. The discs, which are the same size as DVDs, can hold either 25 or 50GB of data - compared to 4.7 or 9GB on DVDs. That’s great, but less great is the fact that the inclusion of the drive is believed to be responsible for much of the cost of the console, and Sony admits that Blu-Ray shortages are behind the decision to delay the European launch of PS3 to 2007. What’s more, Sony has been accused of putting the drive into the console just to drive sales of high-definition movies on Blu-Ray discs - effectively making consumers pay for a Hi-Def movie player in their console, whether they want one or not.

So what’s the real reason for Blu-Ray being in every PS3? Are people who just want to play games, and aren’t bothered about Blu-Ray movies, really going to see any benefits?

“Well, they’re going to get, in their console, not just the movie format but the data transport format - which will be at least the next ten years,” Harrison explains. “DVD is not sufficient capacity to power the kind of data consumption, or to feed the data consumption needs of Cell and RSX. It’s got nothing to do with movies. Just purely as a gameplay device, we need Blu-Ray to supply the kind of data that PS3 games use.”

“It’s not just about graphics - it’s about 7.1 audio, it’s about speech, it’s about having up to 1080p movies built into the game; it’s high res textures, it’s animation, it’s everything that goes into making a very rich and varied next-gen experience. Already, at our launch titles, we’re getting up close to the 25GB limit that we have on our Blu-Ray discs this year. Next year we’ll raise that to 50GB, and I’d expect that we’ll be getting close to that in the fairly near future as well.”

“Don’t take my word from it - there was a great quote from a guy from EA who said that whenever there’s a new disc format, you always struggle to think how developers will fill it, but they always do. I suppose that game development is like gas, it expands to fill the available space. Once you have that technical capability, the creative desire to exploit it follows very quickly thereafter.”

One of the things that people are concerned about is that discs will be filled with high-resolution video scenes rather than actual game content - which seems like a fair concern, since at the moment game creators seem to be fitting next-gen titles perfectly well onto DVDs. The question, then, is whether there’s relevant, interactive content that is going to need this sort of disc.

“Absolutely,” Harrison says. “I mean, not every game is going to fill 25 or 50GB. I completely accept that - but there will be games that require that this year, and will push that further in years to come. It’s not just, as you say, about movies - it’s about 7.1 audio, it’s about animation, it’s about high resolution textures. If you have a graphics chip capable of displaying the textures in a high enough resolution, the designers would want to exploit that benefit creatively.”

“So partly it’s visual, partly it’s sound, and partially it’ll be down to gameplay benefits as well - more levels, more detail, richer experiences. Also, I see nothing wrong with having non-interactive, full HD sequences as part of the game - that’s all part of the production value and the experience that you get when you buy the game. I don’t see that as a weakness at all.”

One spanner in the works, though, is Sony’s own announcement a few weeks ago that it’s going to be shipping some games where you buy a cheap disc with relatively little content on it, and then download more content over the network as you go along. Two titles like that are Singstar and Gran Turismo HD - which begs the question, what do you need a Blu-Ray disc for if you’re just going to be downloading everything and storing it on the PS3 hard drive? Doesn’t that make the whole Blu-Ray idea a bit, well, irrelevant?

Not so, says Harrison. “Both of the games that you cite there will have very large databases of content on the disc - I don’t know exactly how big today, but definitely way more than anything we can do on DVD,” he says. “Then, those games will be extended and expanded via downloadable content, which will be added to the user’s hard drive.”

“There will be games that start off relatively small, in terms of initial disc capacity, and then the users can extend and expand the experience by downloading content. What that allows us to do as a publisher is perhaps a year after, or two years after, we can take all of that downloadable content and put it onto the disc, and republish, or add value, or some other incentive, to the consumers who didn’t buy first time around - so that gives us plenty of future proof options for how we deliver content to users. All of that is only possible because of Blu-Ray.”

Out of space. Check back on Three Speech soon for Harrison’s reply to our questions about rumble in the PS3 pad - and why Sony has added a HDMI video port to the low-end PS3 system at the eleventh hour!

By Rob Fahey (Eurogamer.net)