PlayStation icon and industry legend Shuhei Yoshida is to leave the company after 31 years, he's revealed in a new interview, although it looks like this won't be the last we'll see of him.
In a new PlayStation Podcast episode, for which highlights are available via the PlayStation Blog, Yoshida says he'll be leaving Sony Interactive Entertainment on January 15th, which means his total time with the company will fall just short of 32 years.
As Yoshida points out in the interview, he was a key part of the original PlayStation project, and since then, he's been instrumental to the brand, serving as a producer on several major PlayStation games as well as a major corporate executive within Sony itself.
Yoshida joined the PlayStation team in February 1993; in the PlayStation Podcast interview, he says he was the "first non-technical person" to join lead engineer Ken Kutaragi's team for the project.
According to Yoshida, when Sony Computer Entertainment was first formed in 1993, it was small enough for everyone to be "in one room at the hotel" that served as the venue for the launch party. Yoshida remembers "about 80 people total" being part of the PlayStation team at that time.
Since then, Yoshida has been involved with several major PlayStation projects, including serving as a producer on games like Jak and Daxter, Gran Turismo, and The Last Guardian, as well as essentially becoming the public face of the PS4 console launch in 2013.
Although he's at the very respectable age of 60, Yoshida doesn't appear to have any plans to retire from the industry as a whole anytime soon.
Responding on social media platform X to a user who's concerned Yoshida will be disappearing from gaming altogether, the gaming icon says he'd "like to stay in the industry", so we'll likely see him again before long.
Will he pop up fronting a NetEase studio like some of his fellow industry luminaries? We'll have to wait and see.
