Sony's Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida has told Edge he wants the PlayStation 4 to be about more than shooters and that's why Knack was shown off during the console's reveal event.
Asked whether the decision to show Knack first at the meeting was a tribute to PS4 system architect Mark Cerny, who's also developing the platformer title, Yoshida commented "Yeah, I am very proud that happened. Some people questioned: 'the first game to show on PS4 – is it Knack?!
"It was pretty intentional," he said, adding "Mark's idea was like 'what about [a] Crash Bandicoot for PS4? when he suggested the concept of Knack," Sony have never owned the right's to Crash Bandicoot, they currently reside with Activision. "We were like yeah we hate to see all the PS4 games being FPS or action-adventure or very photorealistic, you know big-budget blockbuster games. And you know people like these games but these are not the only kinds of games the people can have fun with."
Yoshida was quick to emphasise that while technically impressive titles such as Drive Club and Killzone Shadow Fall were demonstrated at the event the PS4 isn't just about processing power and memory.
"Yeah, so almost the biggest message that we wanted to send in preparing for the event as well as in designing PS4 was… we at Sony and we at Sony Computer Entertainment, it's just natural for us to enhance the core technology and performance of the hardware, but it's not the hardware that is the biggest focus."
"When you look at the five key principles behind the PS4, none of them are hardware related, actually. It's all about how people use and experience, enjoy games, realised by the system software features and network functions."
While Knack was shown first Sony went on to reveal Shadow Fall as well as some of Bungie's upcoming Destiny in the shooter genre. The PS4 will launch globally this year according to GameStop while additional details on the system, including the Dualshock 4 controller and Eye camera were revealed recently at GDC.
