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The Retro Hour (Retro Gaming Podcast)

523: What It Was REALLY Like Working at Sony PlayStation in the 90s - The Retro Hour EP523

The Retro Hour (Retro Gaming Podcast) · March 20, 2026

Shared from search: God of War

01:43:04 - 01:43:51

know the game suggested that original demo um i bet you were happy to get your teeth into some fantasy as well yeah it did feel very different yeah and i you know as a massive gamer at that time you know i'm still am i there were i was playing a lot of those games i was a big god of all one god god war two was one of the games i loved the most on my ps3 because it came out right when the ps3 came out and you could play it on ps3 upscaled and smoothed and um so i remember you know those kind of games was a big…

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01:43:04 - 01:43:51

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... help with collision mapping like whatever we were doing we just helped as much as we can and the the cambridge team kind of inserted itself into the structure just to really help execute what was again you know again probably a large chunk of that game is on the cutting room floor but what we managed to ship i think really delivered on the promise of what they that you know the game suggested that original demo um i bet you were happy to get your teeth into some fantasy as well yeah it did feel very different yeah and i you know as a massive gamer at that time you know i'm still am i there were i was playing a lot of those games i was a big god of all one god god war two was one of the games i loved the most on my ps3 because it came out right when the ps3 came out and you could play it on ps3 upscaled and smoothed and um so i remember you know those kind of games was a big dmc fan like all those kind of action combat games i was a big fan of um so getting to work on one and you know have it be made by you know friends and people we knew um was was really fun so did you um play much god of war three as well well i played god of war one and two extensively um and my connection to god of war three really happened because of heavenly sword um i was working we when we finished heavenly sword there was a negotiation we were we were looking at doing a heavenly sword two um and you know i was gonna be lead designer on it so i was like well so many santa monica are in the playstation stable like we should ...

5 more quotes about God of War from this episode

01:41:19 - 01:41:55

really complex animations and you know again multi-port camera rendering and all kinds of depth of field all these kind of crazy rendering effects that we could do ps3 was mind-blowing um and i think mostly through that heavenly sword lens i think heavenly sword as well it's got that god of war connection uh storyline wise and also epic scale of it just like yeah it kind of feels totally different 24 the game you know totally different going into something like that it's like a new world and everything seems a…

00:05:43 - 00:06:21

... We go into so much as well you know he was later working on a Diablo 3 as well which you know is a huge title God of War 3 as well which we know recently got a remaster and is another huge title and we talk about a few others as well so he's got a great history because he's spanning from PlayStation 1 era to PlayStation 3. What did you think of this interview there? I loved it because I think when you hear from Alex he's a real fan of it all as well as and he mentions how if the original yeah yeah he's not only…

00:58:13 - 00:58:48

and uh worked for quite a few pretty cool companies you know sony blizzard dice zenny max on uh some classic playstation titles there medieval primal and uh 24 the game which is a surprisingly good game as well a really good one that one and uh diablo 3 of course god of war 3 and uh the remasters as well which have come out um he's also got a podcast called dev to dev as well which we think you should all check out um first of course uh with the podcast we always ask a question and that's uh what was your first…

01:23:01 - 01:23:34

on the cutting room floor but um yeah no i think i think medieval two i think evolved the mechanics quite a bit right there was dan hann there was the the big boxer guy right there was some there was more variation in gameplay mechanics than there was in medieval one so that led to some more complexity in testing and i think those battles as well like i know you worked on god of war later and stuff but some of those boss fights feel uh quite close to that as well in in a way of like you know just having grand uh…

01:45:34 - 01:46:07

of the industry um so it's really were they like much bigger games you know coming onto a team developing something like that from from a much smaller team must have been um uh quite a thing 100 yeah i mean you know they'd already built two god of wars god of all three was a new god of war on a new hardware platform because it was ps3 so they were rebuilding their engine um and and you know sony santa monica at that time wasn't a giant team not like that we have now but relative to what i knew yeah like there…

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