Sie London Studio

The Sony game makers striving to make innovation part of the furniture

- Jen Simpkins

Sony’s largest internal development studio is also perhaps its most experimental. It might sound like a counterintuitive approach for the PlayStation giant to encourage, but it’s done good business: SIE London Studio is responsible for mainstream hits such as the EyeToy and SingStar series, as well as the Wonderbook augmented-reality peripheral and VR sampling menu PlayStation VR Worlds. Its creative endeavours in software have always been intertwined with Sony’s hardware. Now at the forefront of SIE London Studio’s future plans, PlayStation VR is a fine project for a team that has always produced magic from unexpected places.

Indeed, the beginnings of the studio would set the tone. Originally Team Soho, it began to accumulate new talent in 2000, most of the recruits university graduates with little to no experience. tara Saunders, today the studio’s head of operations, was one of them. She had her sights set on becoming an animator, and had already interviewed at the BBC earlier the same day she first visited London Studio. “But when I saw the technology involved in game-making, how it really brought the art and tech worlds together, that was the thing that really inspired me.” As an animator on ambitious GTAIII homage The Getaway, she was soon dashing around London with her team members, taking photos of its buildings in order to recreate the city in-game. “There were a lot of people that didn’t have preconceptions about what making a game was like,” she says. “Having people that can think fresh things, and not just do what everybody else has done, means that there’s a lot of technical and creative challenges and you need people whose minds are open to that. Like, ‘Okay, the rulebook isn’t set, how do we write it?’”