Sony 'built a giant DualShock' to make Knack accessible to kids

The research and development arm of Sony Computer Entertainment built a custom giant controller, some fifty per cent larger than a standard DualShock 3, to assess the difficulties children have playing games.

Mark Cerny, the PlayStation 4 system architect, revealed the strange R&D project during his keynote address at the Develop Conference in Brighton.

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Speaking to a gathering of gamers, developers and other industry professionals, Cerny explained that holding the giant pad made developers realise how difficult it was - for example - to reach the shoulder buttons across the roof of the controller.

Though Cerny has built the underpinning hardware architecture of the PlayStation 4, his giant controller experiment was used to help inform his other project - the PS4 launch title Knack.

"With Knack, I wanted to tap into the nostalgia of early PlayStation games," he said.

He said the children in the '90s started gaming on handhelds - systems with fewer buttons and a more basic layout - and this essentially trained them for home console controllers, which are far more exotic and complex.

"But these days young people are starting out on smartphones, and so we have this gulf between straightforward touch-screen gaming and hardcore triple-A titles," he said.

Knack, he said, exemplified his ambition to reconnect casual and hardcore gamers. He said the project, which is expected to be a PlayStation 4 launch title, has been built to be as user-friendly as someone's first console game.

Elsewhere in the Develop keynote, he said Sony has internally "had an epiphany" with how it deals with indie developers.

Sony "ended up radically simplifying" the way any indie developer can get their game published on PS4. The keystone policy here is self-publishing, allowing even bedroom coders to have the chance to deliver their content on PS4 or PS Vita.

"Indie to us is smaller, nimbler titles, whatever they may be," Cerny added.

"It's all about what the game developer wants to create. We feel it is essential to bring indie games to our platform because of the variety they bring."

Image: Shuhei Yoshida

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