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It was a night no E3-goer will forget in a hurry. Sony's extraordinary press conference last week opened with the return of The Last Guardian - almost 10 years into development and almost five since its last appearance before the press. The shocking revivals didn't end there as Sony, playing fairy godmother to ageing gamers, continued to grant their deepest and most apparently hopeless wishes with the launch of Yu Suzuki's Shenmue 3 Kickstarter and the announcement that Square Enix would attempt the impossible - or improbable - and remake its classic role-playing game, Final Fantasy 7.Later that night, Shuhei Yoshida, head of Sony's Worldwide Studios and the man with ultimate responsibility for The Last Guardian's production, went for dinner with Suzuki and Square Enix's Shinji Hashimoto. You can imagine the broad, relieved smiles all round - if only because the three of them wouldn't have to face that question from reporters ever again.
But many other questions remained. A few days later in a quiet hotel suite, I got the chance to put some of them to a relaxed Yoshida, whom I found every bit as affable and enthusiastic as his reputation and Twitter persona would lead you to believe. He laid the blame for The Last Guardian's lengthy delay entirely at his own door, or rather the door of the Sony engineers who couldn't get it running to their satisfaction on PS3 (although it's worth noting that the game's director Fumito Ueda, now working on it as an independent contractor, characterised the delay as "a corporate decision" in a recent Game Informer interview). Yoshida confirmed that PS4 architect and Knack director Mark Cerny had contributed to the game's PS4 retooling, but described rumours that he had been parachuted in to replace Ueda and "save" the project as "totally bogus". He claimed that the game's budget remains relatively modest, despite the epic length of its production, and said that, its tortuous development notwithstanding, he would be keen to work with Ueda again.
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