LAS VEGAS—The second day of the 2015 DICE Summit opened with two titans from the PlayStation era chatting about the platform's history. Sony Worldwide Studios President Shu Yoshida and Oddworld Inhabitants Creative Director Lorne Lanning faced off and recalled their respective origin stories, including Yoshida's early explosion as producer for the Crash Bandicoot and Gran Turismo series and Lanning's early third-party PS contributions.

Midway through, the conversation came off the rails as the gaming veterans, and board members of the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, discussed the only time the two men had seriously argued. The board wanted to vote to award a lifetime achievement award to former Sony Worldwide Studios President Ken Kutaragi, Yoshida recalled, but only "one bold member" offered a nay vote.

"I was totally opposed to it!" Lanning said in response at the keynote. "He changed half of the industry, is what you said. I said he put half of the development community out of business!"

Lanning went on to describe the financial challenges of making games for developer-unfriendly platforms like PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3, particularly in convincing publishers and other funding sources that a game could be completed on time and on budget. "Now you find out, whoa, we have zero ability to predict [time and money costs]," Lanning said. "We have to discover, and we [couldn't get] financing to discover."

That, combined with a changing third-party publisher landscape, forced Lanning to drop his former Sony partnership. "You opened doors for Microsoft!" Lanning said. "Their hook was, 'we’ll build a machine for developers.' They have a brand challenge coming into the business [as a new games company], but they promised to make costs more predictable. We were trying to survive. Microsoft was a way of landing." Lanning reminded the audience that Oddworld: Munch's Odyssee launched day-and-date with the original Xbox "on time and on budget."

“I, I, I hate those teams”

Yoshida, to his credit, acknowledged the developer-unfriendly issues of those consoles' hardware: "The making of unique hardware of PS2, and that [game makers] eventually learned how to [design for it], it enforced Ken’s vision of making great hardware innovation." Yoshida said. "In a sense, he had the confidence to say, 'When you see a high mountain, you have to climb.' His confidence was, top teams who would overcome. That didn’t help the philosophy of designing for PS3."

Lanning and Yoshida have clearly mended their business relationship in the years since. In addition to Oddworld games returning to PlayStation systems, Lanning praised the PlayStation 4's developer-friendly moves. He remarked that he was surprised to get a free development kit for the console before its launch, as opposed to paying up to $15,000 per dev kit in prior console cycles.

The rest of the keynote covered the entirety of Yoshida's career, including his first job in Sony's PC division in 1986, his rise as PlayStation's first major game producer for Western games—"Oh, that guy speaks English, let him try"—and his battles with marketing and business managers over longer development cycles. "'Call of Duty games come out every year! Why can't you do this for us, for our titles?'" Yoshida said, as if quoting his marketing managers. "We respect those [game design] teams... but I, I, I hate those teams." [This sounded like emphasis, not stuttering.] "I wish they were not doing what they're doing so hard."