This is a fairly long interview with Sony's Jack Tretton, but the feature of this interview is how he compares consoles to food. He says the PS3 is the best thing on the menu from lobster to steak, the PS2 is your favourite burger, the Wii is a lollipop and the Xbox 360 is the thing on the menu that the cook isn't reliable with and you get sick. Other parts of the interview include whether he considers Killzone 2 to be equal to Halo and about the redesigned PSP.

GamePro: Before E3, there were all these rumors about the redesigned PSP [featuring a flash drive] so I have to admit I was a little let down when I heard it was only going to be thinner and lighter. When I got my hands on one, though, I was impressed...though it still seemed like an incremental improvement. Why not embed a flash drive?

Jack Tretton: I think we're talking about a short period of time here. Playstation Portable has only been out for a couple of years, and I think it will continue to evolve over time. We are absolutely thrilled with the PSP and we love it. We think it's state-of-the-art technology and we think these improvements take that technology and just give you an updated form factor. But clearly we haven't abandoned the 25 million consumers that are fans of it.

I think one of the risks you run into when you get into [embedding flash memory into a new PSP model] is, what happens to the people who already bought it? And are you going to get the development community to make UMD based games? We have to make sure that anything we do, as far as the evolution of hardware, doesn't leave consumers behind. You can talk about price all day long, but if you don't get the features you need for the long term it's a bait and switch. The good news is you get the price you want and the bad news is the technology has been abandoned. I don't think we ever want to do that to consumers.

Speaking from a personal perspective, I'm not a terrific fan of the Wii. I think it's great for the industry, but it doesn't speak to me as a gamer. The technology is pretty limited and I think that in 2-3 years that it could go into this casual Tamagotchi kinda thing. It seems like a different industry almost. Could you speak to that and how you see the Wii and DS fitting into your philosophy?

JT: I would tend to agree with everything that you said. Let's talk about portable gaming since we were just on PSP. My view of portable gaming used to be little kids on airplanes playing to keep them quiet with software that was not comparable to a console experience. I think with the PSP we've taken that console experience and put it into the hands of consumers like you and me. Now you have an entertainment experience that appeals to someone other than a little kid. We've gotten it out there to the tune of 25 million consumers, and with our software offerings and pricing, we're starting to reach down to a younger consumer. I think it's much easier to reach down than to reach up. I really think we'll have the same degree of success with that strategy on portable that we had on the console.

Synergized via gamepro.com »