Shuhei Yoshida Shares His Favorite Games And A New Role As He Leaves PlayStation
Shuhei Yoshida gets a much stranger role on his last day with PlayStation.
January 15 marks Shuhei Yoshida’s last day at Sony, as he announced in November 2024. Yoshida is moving on after serving as president of Sony Interactive Entertainment’s Worldwide Studios from 2008 to 2019, and as head of Sony’s Indies Initiative since then. But before heading out the door, Yoshida had two indie-centric announcements to make, including an appearance in an upcoming game.
To cap off his 31-year career with PlayStation, Yoshida chose 22 of his favorite games to feature as the PSN’s Monthly Picks feature. While the list features games like Ghost of Tsushima and Nioh 2, it leans heavily toward indies — unsurprising for someone who spent his career championing smaller developers and helping them get their games onto PlayStation.
Yoshida received a BAFTA Fellowship for his work in the games industry.
Among the indie picks is Before Your Eyes, a unique game that uses its players own eye movements as a control scheme. As the story-heavy game plays out, it uses a webcam or VR helmet to track its player’s eyes. When it detects a blink, it moves onto the next scene, which is both a poignant statement about the passage of time and a clever bit of alternative control magic.
The Sekiro-inspired Metroidvania Nine Sols makes the list, and it’s also a game that Yoshida called one of his favorites of 2024. Also of note are Ape Escape and Shadow of the Colossus, both of which come from Sony’s now-shuttered Japan Studio, which for years created some of PlayStation’s most inventive games. They’re joined by Journey, an indie game with a special connection to Yoshida. In a 2024 interview with the PlayStation Blog discussing his retirement, Yoshida named Journey receiving the Game of the Year Award at DICE Summit as one of the highlights of his career.
Yoshida appears as a playable character in the PlayStation version of Super Time Force Ultra.
Super Time Force Ultra is another game with a personal, though altogether different, connection to Yoshida. On top of being a fantastic arcade-style shooter that’s well worth checking out, it also features Yoshida himself. In the PlayStation version of the game, he appears as an exclusive playable character, armed with a cell phone that fires emojis at enemies.
As strange of a twist as it is for Yoshida to show up in Super Time Force Ultra, it turns out it won’t be his only appearance in a video game soon. On Yoshida’s final day at PlayStation, Paradise Killer developer Kaizen Game Works announced the voice cast for its upcoming Promise Mascot Agency in a video shared exclusively with IGN. Among the newly announced cast is — you guessed it — Shuhei Yoshida.
Yoshida takes his first voice acting role in the upcoming Promise Mascot Agency.
For his first-ever voice acting role, Yoshida plays a character named MonouGe. Like most of the characters in Promise Mascot Agency, MonouGe is a bizarre mascot who players will have to manage. The reveal trailer describes MonouGe as a character who “just loves games” (and incidentally describes Yoshida himself as a “gaming legend” and “handsome dude”). Yoshida isn’t the only games industry legend to voice a character in Promise Mascot Agency either. He appears alongside Hidetaka Suehiro, better known as Swery, developer of Deadly Premonition and The Missing.
It would be hard to overstate the impact Yoshida had on PlayStation during his time there. He was part of the original PlayStation team put together by Ken Kutanagi to launch the PS1, where he worked as a liaison to convince developers to work with the upstart console. After being made president, he was an extremely public face for PlayStation, showing up at events like E3 and on social media, often interacting directly with fans. Both as president and head of the Indies Initiative, he advocated for independent developers, which makes it all the more fitting that they’re now honoring him in turn. When he announced his departure from Sony, Yoshida said that he planned to remain in the games industry. It’s not clear what’s next for him, but a role in Kaizen’s anticipated new game is as good a start as any.
