Yamato Magazine: Let’s start at the beginning. What brought you to Japan in the first place?
Bobby Dixit: I was in my third year at King’s College London and I was struggling to know which direction I wanted to take. An opportunity came up to study in Japan at the Chiba Institute of Technology for a year. Of course I went.
Yamato Magazine: How did that experience take you back to Japan?
Bobby: After that, I came back to the UK to complete my master’s and then I interviewed for a position to do my second master’s thesis at Sony’s Broadcast & Professional Europe research labs in Basingstoke. It was between me and a mature student who I thought would get the job because he was very polished. There I was, a kid with a ponytail in flip flops.
But I got the role and must have impressed the right people because at the end of my project, one thing led to another, and I was ultimately offered a full-time job. However, I’d had some unpleasant experiences, and I’d taken to jokingly calling Basingstoke “Boringstoke”. I was commuting from London and, frankly, I wasn’t keen on staying; I’d been thinking about finance like many peers and ended up doing night shifts at a computer data processing company instead. A few months later someone put my CV in front of one of Sony’s presidents.
Early one morning I got a call from Japan; I thought it was spam and said I couldn’t afford the airfare. The woman replied, “No, no — we’ll pay for it,” and only later did I discover it was a one way ticket. I’d also just been offered a job at Fidelity in Sevenoaks, but Tokyo sounded so much more exotic — it was a no-brainer really, and the rest is history. To be honest, the UK wasn’t exactly the best place to be around during the early to mid-nineties, so it just seemed to make a lot more sense. I’m not sure I can say I would make the same choice again, but that’s hindsight for you.
Yamato Magazine: How did that role develop over time?
Bobby: I spent five years working at Sony’s HQ on developing semiconductors, mobile phones and HD TV technologies. I was given a unique opportunity to choose where I wanted to go next. I considered transferring to San Diego to work on Sony’s VIAO computers. I’d initially turned down a job at PlayStation because I wasn’t that keen to pursue working on the hardware side and I was focused on getting into this new-fangled thing that was taking the world by storm – the internet and dot-com bubble.
Whilst in California interviewing at Sony San Diego, I received a fax from the CTO of PlayStation, who told me there could be an opportunity to be involved in the internet and that convinced me to turn down the San Diego offer, and all the potential pleasures of living in Sunny Southern California and return to the guiles of Tokyo. And that was that. I became employee number-one for what would eventually become PlayStation Online, this is, PlayStation Network (PSN). In those early days, no one understood or comprehended what the internet was, and it became a case of inventing something from nothing.
Progress was clearly not going to happen overnight, so whilst working on PlayStation Online, my boss also forced me to join the project I’d originally turned down the offer on – to develop the first wireless PlayStation controller. And surprisingly, being a member of that team, my name ended up on the original patents for the wireless controller technology!
Yamato Magazine: That’s incredible. What was the culture like at PlayStation at the time?
Bobby: The early days were wild, scrappy, cross-disciplinary, and very often chaotic. It was about experimenting and thinking outside the box in true startup format, whilst being within a large organisation. Sony as a company was simply not about gaming. It had content businesses: a music division and a Hollywood movie division that was completely separate from its electronics business, which at the time, was still the largest division within Sony, but gaming was an entirely alien landscape.
PlayStation was set up to build a new ecosystem from the ground up with new software, hardware, branding and third-party relationships under the vision of Ken Kutaragi. He faced a lot of skepticism, but he wouldn’t be deterred. So he pooled together a bunch of people from the electronics side of the business, the content side, at that time, Sony Music Entertainment – and created a joint-venture company which was 50:50 owned by Sony Electronics and SME, and on 16 November 1993, Sony Computer Entertainment was established, bringing together skilled engineers, third-party licensors, content creators, and marketers from across the company.
The key thing was that Ken was willing to break internal norms. PlayStation had to feel different from Sony’s polished consumer image. We wanted something edgier and more youthful, something that resonated globally. Brand sessions asked not just “What does it look like?” but “What does it feel like when someone boots it up?” That’s where things like the startup chime and the visual identity came from. We were thinking globally from day one, balancing Japanese roots with the need to be locally relevant in markets like London and New York. The diversity of talent we pulled together — engineers, creatives, licensors and marketers — is a big part of why PlayStation succeeded.
PlayStation was to be its only product. The story of PlayStation is closely intertwined with that of the story of how the concept of online gaming came about. Japan went with the ethernet route and had the idea of magically trying to convert every household into being online and ready for gaming, whilst the rest of the world stuck to dial-up modems. The initial idea for the PlayStation 2 in every territory outside Japan was that it was going to work on dial-up modems (if you’ve ever wondered where the term ‘broadband’ comes from, it’s because dial-up connectivity was called ‘narrowband’) because nobody had a modem or could connect to anything that had an ethernet port.
That was the start of a major paradigm shift. We also made big technical gambles, like moving from cartridges to CDs, which unlocked storage for higher quality audio, full motion video and cinematic storytelling. Each PlayStation generation built on that ambition: PS2 pushed DVD and multimedia, PS3 delivered HD and online functionality albeit with growing pains, PS4 simplified development and supported indies and streaming, and PS5 continues that thread of risk and innovation.
Yamato Magazine: Do you think your work on the original wireless controller helped to set the tone for future hardware and models that PlayStation created?
Bobby: Absolutely. I think what I did was part of a wider story of innovation that has been at Sony and PlayStation since the beginning. It’s in examples of Sony being the first developers of the CD and then the shift in using CDs as a storage mechanism for games and moving away from cartridges that Nintendo and other consoles were using at the time. This was carried on into the original PS1, which opened the door in terms of storage capacity, audio quality and visual immersion.
All of these qualities amalgamated to give rise to CGI-generated video and cinematic cutscenes for storytelling that is part of almost every video game today. When the PS2 came out, it was a facilitation of CD to DVD media and multimedia and a jump to eight times the storage from the first model. The PS3 introduced HD-quality and online gaming growing pains. It was the model that set the trend for the huge leap in processing power for other consoles because it was a supercomputer in a box.
The problem with the PS3 was that because there was so much processing power, nobody really knew how to code games for it. That’s where one of my roles was critically important. One of the things I did was to bring the tools and middleware to game developers that enabled them to better leverage the sheer processing power of the supercomputer in a black-box as effectively as possible in developing kick-ass games.
The PS4 was an extension of that and simplified processes for game developers and introduced streaming. With the PS5, there’s an ongoing story of innovation and risk that is the definition of PlayStation as a brand.
Yamato Magazine: You’ve been open before about the realities of working in Japan and that there being certain barriers and cultural cues to be aware of. What are some tips for Westerners who’d like to work within the gaming and pop culture industries in Japan?
Bobby: The language and work culture are two of the most important things and that encompasses how teams collaborate, how decisions are made and how feedback is given. For the Japanese, group harmony and hierarchy are important, which can be very different to the fast-prototyping Western startup mentality. It’s also worth understanding the creative philosophy of the Japanese. There’s a different sensibility with storytelling, pacing and player experience. There’s an obsession with craftsmanship, detail, stylisation and nuanced, imaginative worlds.
Western games, on the other hand, are focused on open-world realism, branching narratives and stories. Neither is better. They are different lenses, and you can compare The Last Of Us and Persona 5 together as an example. Both are brilliant and have different design philosophies. If you are looking to get into that world, immerse yourself in it. Learn Japanese at least to a functional level, and absorb the cultural norms.
The better your language and cultural skills, the more headway you’re likely to make. Study the creative philosophy behind Japanese games — their obsession with craft, pacing and stylisation — by playing widely beyond the well known titles such as Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid. There are fan projects and indie projects to work on for getting experience, and you can also network respectfully at related events to develop those connections.
Being patient is also key. The hiring process in Japan gets done through relationships and trust, and a CV or resume doesn’t carry the same weight. Instead, come at the Japanese gaming industry with curiosity, humility and an appreciation for how Japanese developers think. So, it’s good to adopt the mindset of ‘think global but act local’ – as Akio Morita, the founder of Sony used to say. Meetings will be in Japanese and documents will be in Japanese. You don’t have to be fluent in the language, but unless you can communicate verbally on some level, there’s a pretty hard and low ceiling to how much you can contribute meaningfully. This is changing, albeit slowly.
Yamato Magazine: That’s a lot of great information Bobby. What kind of projects are you currently involved in?
Bobby: Through working at PlayStation, I’ve become interested in gamification as a whole and the psychology behind that. It is key to learning and human development in so many ways today, from teaching children maths at one end of the scale, to GDPR compliance training at the other; and I’ve done both.
I’m doing a lot of work in the education tech space to see how gamification can be used for good, and especially how children develop and learn through play, not just video games, but more importantly, in a return to encouraging outdoor play.
This partly stems from my position as being a governor at one of the largest primary schools in London. I’m also interested in the renewable energy, sustainability and AI spaces. What always drives me is how technology and design can be used to solve the problems facing us as a species in this world, and how to make a meaningful and impactful difference to people’s lives, regardless of how small or great those impacts are.
Biography: Bobby Dixit began his professional career at Sony where he worked across multiple divisions, including a 7-year stint at PlayStation, where he was a founding member of what evolved into the online PlayStation Network. In 2017, Bobby founded Autonomous Intelligent Mobility Solutions (AIMS) –a platform specialising in location-based-authentication for automotive vehicles.
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