The Many Sayings of Phil Harrison

There was a time when it was generally agreed that Phil Harrison was actually made out of PlayStation. He was Sony's most recognizable, media-friendly non-Japanese exec. Dude lived and breathed PlayStation.

From the thrilling launch of the original PlayStation through the glory years of PlayStation 2 and up to the faltering introduction of PlayStation 3, Harrison was there, delivering the message, often accompanied by his trademark rubber ducks, or Ken Kutaragi.

He left Sony in 2008 and has been doing his own thing. But now,he's back...at bitter rival Microsoft. 

Yegads. That's a helluva switcheroo. It's like Messi transferring to Real Madrid or Newt joining the Democrats or Kanye going country. 

So, IGN decided to taken a look back at the many interviews Harrison has given over the years, and some of his best quotes... 

ON PLAYSTATION 3

"PlayStation 3 is a masterpiece of design and technology." 

"The PlayStation 3 has the best offering for any kind of digital entertainment be it web-browsing, gameplay, network functionality or media functionality." 

"PlayStation 3 launch has been, objectively by any measure, more successful than PlayStation 1, PlayStation 2 or other competing system out previously. We're incredibly happy with how things are going." 

ON PLAYSTATION EXCLUSIVES

"I really don't believe gamers mind who makes the game, so long as the games they buy on their system are the best games they can get anywhere." 

ON MICROSOFT

"I've always been very admiring of some of the things Microsoft has managed to do with their branding and some of the consumer elements of their service, but it's always important to remember that more people play online games through PlayStation 2 than any other consoles. On a worldwide basis it is the most popular online console by virtue of the size of the installed base." 

"I have a great deal of respect for Halo. I think it's a great piece of software, but it's one title. I think that it's very dangerous to build an entire brand personality or platform around a single title." 

ON XBOX 360

"I think it's a lot better than their first introduction to the console business." 

WHEN ASKED WHAT HE PLAYS ON RIVAL CONSOLES

"I've played a lot of things recently but for personal preference there's enough on PlayStation 3 and PSP to keep me extremely busy." 

- GK

ON WORKING FOR SONY

"Sometimes I feel like I've got the front seat on the most amazing rollercoaster ride you can imagine." 

ON THE ORIGINAL PLAYSTATION

"The first time I read through those specs, I thought, hang on, this must be a misprint!" 

SPEAKING PRIOR TO THE LAUNCH OF NINTENDO 64

"Obviously I'm biased, but Nintendo haven't got proven technology to work yet and there are no games visible. There's nothing to wait for." 

ON KIDS

"There is undoubtedly a generation of kids alive on the planet today who will never purchase a physical media package for any of their digital entertainment." 

ON NEXT-GEN CONSOLES

"The console companies, if they wanted to take true market leadership, could [drop physical media] in the next generation. There's no reason why Microsoft and Sony, in particular, couldn't push that change for the next iteration of their major consoles." 

- Edge

ON SINGLE-PLAYER MEGA-GAMES

"The idea of single-player, story-driven games I think are going to become rarer and more expensive to produce....That doesn't mean it goes away completely, just that there'd be less of them." 

ON THE DEATH OF CONSOLES

"The future for the dedicated console as it is currently constructed, from chips and hard drives that you buy once and games that you buy at $60 or $40 a time; that business model is almost at the end of its life." 

ON REGRETS

"If I'd had the chance to revisit my [younger] self I would have encouraged him to be more ambitious, bigger scale, more aggressive in changing the way games were made and also to have invested more heavily in creating online experiences - however experimental, however unsuccessful." 

ON HIS PROGRAMMING DAYS

"The best bit about a Commodore 64 was when you turned it on it said 'Ready?' with a flashing cursor - inviting you to experiment. 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 realize the game was rubbish after all that effort!" 

ON BEING WRONG

"I don't deny that we've made some mistakes and have been rightly flamed for some of them. We learn, we cringe slightly at the memory of some of them from time to time but we move on. And hopefully we're not stupid enough to repeat them!" 

ON SONY'S 'ARROGANCE'

There's always going to be a risk when you are market leader for ten years that we start to lose perspective; and we have to make sure that we don't lose perspective. But I don't think we're arrogant, I think we have to recognize that we're in a highly competitive industry and that anything that we say will be eternally editorialized by professionals and consumers alike. So we're always in the spotlight. 

ON THE LACK OF RUMBLE ON PS3...LATER ADDED

"I believe that the Sixaxis controller offers game designers and developers far more opportunity for future innovation than rumble ever did. Now, rumble I think was the last generation feature; it's not the next-generation feature. I think motion sensitivity is. And we don't see the need to do that. Having said that, there will be specific game function controllers, potentially like steering wheels that do include vibration or feedback function -- not from us but from third parties."