Cory Barlog, director of the PlayStation 2 classic God of War II, has revealed that former Sony Worldwide Studios boss Phil Harrison had originally pushed to have the sequel release on the PlayStation 3.
Speaking to 1up.com, Barlog stated, Shuhei was handling a lot of the projects through all the studios in America. He was pushing for PS2, and I was kind of on the fence. PS2 for me was like, ‘We can make a really great game; we don’t have to catch up with the technology and start from scratch.’”
“We could focus on just making a great game, hence the reason that it was bigger and just had more content, and we could focus on refining everything that we had.”
“But Phil had brought it up, “Why aren’t we doing this on PS3?” I was actually in a presentation for the game I think a year into it, or maybe eight months into it, and Shuhei and Phil and bunch of other Japanese executives were there,” said Barlog.
Ultimately, however, the team came to the conclusion that releasing the game on PS2 wasn’t such a bad idea afterall, and indeed turned out to be a smart move.
“We did the whole dog and pony, and then the first thing Phil said was, “Very good, thank you. I just have to ask this, since it seems like the obvious question. Why are we not doing this on PS3?” And I was like, “Uhh.” I kind of looked over at Shu and was like, “You want to take this?” He was a big proponent of it, but in the end I think a lot of people were like, “It’s a smart move to do it on PS2.”