Shahid Kamal Ahmad was once known for bringing strange and exciting games to PlayStation platforms. Now he himself is developing for one of the industry’s strangest and most exciting areas: VR.
Taking to Twitter over the weekend, Ahmad announced that he was ready to stake his future on VR. The former PlayStation figurehead was once Head of Strategic Content at Sony Interactive Entertainment (then known as Sony Computer Entertainment), before leaving to pursue a career in development itself late last year. Fans have kept up with him via his social media accounts, and back in April he launched his own studio, Ultimatum Games. The company’s first game is already in the works.
I’m prepared now to stake my future on VR. When you start making things for VR, first thing that goes is your old TV fig leaf.
— Shahid Kamal Ahmad (@shahidkamal) September 24, 2016
“After less than a week of programming for the [PlayStation VR], I can safely say that almost everything I’d ever learned about video games is redundant,” Ahmad said on Saturday. He stated that he had already been a VR evangelist, having signed games for Sony’s upcoming headset during his days with the company, but was now a full blown zealot. This transformation hasn’t come about from playing VR games, but actually programming some experiments, which he did over the past week.
“I have been in the video games business for 34 years,” he later wrote. “With just four days of work, I am committing to VR for the foreseeable future.” His thread of tweets carried over into earlier today, when he wrote: “I feel like I’ve been treading water for 34 years in this industry and with VR, I have something to swim towards.”
We certainly look forward to seeing what Ahmad has in store for the platform. He’s someone that’s experienced a wide breadth of games of all shapes, sizes and genres. You can see what we mean in the video above, taken from Sony’s Gamescom 2013 press conference, where he revealed several new indie titles he’d helped bring to PlayStation platforms.
Hopefully we’ll see more from Ahmad soon.
