Phil Harrison
Image: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

Former Sony director Phil Harrison is apparently a former Google employee as well, reportedly departing the company at around the time the ill-fated Stadia was shut down in January. Neither Google nor Harrison has officially announced the departure in the months since.

The Stadia was supposed to revolutionise the way players interacted with video games and, instead, ended up being a spectacular failure, as the world was not ready for the all-streaming future the device envisioned.

Harrison has had a fairly chequered career, rising through the ranks at Sony with a career spanning from 1992 to 2008. He spent the next couple of years working at Infogrames / Atari as director (where he pronounced that gamers don't want single-player games) before joining the advisory board of Gaikai in 2010, the cloud streaming company Sony purchased in 2012. Harrison then did a stint at Microsoft, from 2012 to 2015, before bringing his expertise to Google in 2018 as vice president and general manager.

We'd probably slip out the back door ourselves once the Stadia news came down, but it is interesting neither Harrison nor Google itself has made any kind of announcement before or since. We would imagine they were hoping for the storm to die down a little. What do you think of Phil Harrison's stealth departure and of Google staying quiet on the matter? Let us know in the comments section below.

[source businessinsider.com]