As the man in charge of Sony's Worldwide Studios, Shuhei Yoshida (above) oversees the teams behind Uncharted, Gran Turismo, Little Big Planet, and many others. And for the past few years he's also played a key role on Vita, serving as a sort of middleman between the company's software teams and its hardware division. At last week's DICE conference, I asked him a handful of questions about Vita's development history to date.

1UP: Do you remember the first meeting you ever had talking about Vita?

Shuhei Yoshida: Actually I do. Thank you. That's a great question. It was April or March, around that timeframe, of 2008... It's always the chip, the CPU or GPU, that takes the longest in terms of the development cycle. But it first started with R&D. After the PSP, they moved onto R&D for the next thing.

So early spring 2008, there was a management offsite meeting. And at the time, I was based here in the U.S. as head of Worldwide Studios America. I called in to that meeting and saw the unveiling of the portable project for the next generation. And actually, for this project, Kaz [Hirai, now Sony president and CEO] said, "We want Worldwide Studios [to be involved] from the beginning to the end."

So that was a total change. That was about the time Phil Harrison announced his departure to Atari, and eventually I succeeded him as the president of Worldwide Studios, so I discussed with Kaz that maybe I should move to Japan... Running our studios, the main activity is in the U.S. and Europe; we have much bigger development [staff numbers] outside Japan. But because of this new way to work between hardware guys and the software side [it made sense for me to be closer to the hardware team].

There was very limited communication in the past, especially when it comes to new hardware, because of the secrecy involved. They had very tight security in terms of sharing information with us up through PS3 days, so I saw a big sea change of culture and process. That has to be developed, right? It just doesn't happen when Kaz says "You two, talk!" It's not like that, so someone like me needed to be embedded in Tokyo and attend every platform discussion meeting... They might talk about, "Oh we have this new technology that might be great for the next thing," then I could relate them to the proper Worldwide Studios teams...

So specifically, hardware ideas. There's a long list of features that we could have put into this system that eventually we cut down. So with that, we have the target price range for the hardware -- we said, "$250, this is the price" -- and the size of the unit, and the power consumption. Cost of goods, of course. Everything has to fit. So it's great that people say PS Vita has everything, but it doesn't. We cut a lot of potential features.

But the process of doing so was in the past in total secrecy, because of the hardware engineering-driven approach. How their guys kind of imagined "this is more important than that," or "this performance is needed this much." But for the first time with PS Vita for them, instead of answering those questions themselves, now they were able to ask us directly. And not only would we voice opinions or give them ideas -- you know, "if you have a touch panel on the back of the unit maybe we could use this," and that's a start -- but the best part is they created prototypes. For example they created a PS3 controller that had a screen and touch on the top and bottom. So our guys that created PS3 games experimented to use it to simulate what it would feel like to touch with a screen, and gave that code back to them to let them try, so that we could together decide about the performance and what size is necessary to do. For every single piece of tech, we have gone through this process.

So there are two big benefits to that. One is the hardware feature choices -- we are very confident we presented what software developers want for a game system. The other benefit, I hope, is that because they were involved in the process, our teams know why each feature for PS Vita was included. We had lots of time thinking about and prototyping ideas, so hopefully in the launch titles, the new features of PS Vita can be integrated in our titles.

1UP: Were there certain Worldwide Studios teams that put more input in than others? I would assume Bend would since they were making one of the first big games [Uncharted: Golden Abyss, seen below].

SY: Bend was a big part. Their position was to push the graphical limit, right, and break the SDK drivers. [Laughs] They had the hardest time, I imagine, because they were pushing the limit and they had to create a high-end game for the launch, so they worked really closely with especially the graphics and library teams. The other teams had a different kind of focus...

The Wipeout guys came up with this idea of letting [people play cross-platform], and when we announced that at E3 we had very good positive reactions. And Warrior's Lair -- the "Ruin" game -- you can save to the cloud server and continue the game. So many different teams came up with interesting use cases for PS Vita. Bend [made] a big effort, but different teams contributed. And let's not forget Bigbig Studios. They are the reason we decided to have the rear touch pad... Before the Little Deviants demo, I was skeptical about having a rear touch panel, but when I tried that and saw the game world push up as I touched, I thought this was so fresh, so new...

1UP: Do you remember what the first game you guys greenlit was?

SY: [Long pause] It's hard to remember. Some games were concepted after this project was revealed. Like Uncharted was started after they finished Resistance: Retribution -- it was the beginning of 2009, so sometime late 2008 they already were having conversations about the next thing. So that should be one of the early ones. And Little Deviants, because of that tech demo, we said "Let's make it a game." And possibly Wipeout, because people in the UK say it's a UK law to have Wipeout when you launch a PlayStation platform. And Gravity Daze -- I'm so excited. It just came out yesterday in Japan, [and is known as] Gravity Rush in America. That game was in early concepts and prototypes on PS3, actually. That project started on PS3, but as soon as this concept of having a very high-end gyro sensor included came along, we went "this should be made for PS Vita." So that game concept existed before PS Vita [and therefore wasn't necessarily "greenlit" first, but the developers were likely working on it the longest].

1UP: Looking back now, is there anything that you would do differently if you were making Vita all over again?

SY: Because it was the very first process for the new SCE under Kaz to involve Worldwide Studios with the hardware development team, he didn't go so far as to invite the marketing or business side -- what we call our HQs, like SCEA or SCEE, to SCE Japan's side from the beginning. He wanted to take it one step at a time. So Worldwide Studios had daily contact with our HQs and marketing teams and talking about portfolios, and they are very important in the process for making sure what we are making can match with the marketing platform business side's expectations. But for Vita at the early stage we had to keep it kind of secret, so we were part of SCE Japan from that standpoint. It was only after two years or so that Kaz said, "OK, now let's bring in the marketing side to the project." And at that point, there were certain things more business related that we were not looking at. So as soon as the marketing side entered the project...certain key issues were raised. So we had to go back and re-do some of the work.

So to answer your question, going forward, because we are a more integrated company, we should and we will involve the business and marketing side earlier in the process.