Former Sony Exec Phil Harrison Forms New ‘Disruptive’ Company

Phil Harrison, ex-Sony president, has formed a new investment group, which will apparently focus on funding “disruptive” projects, according to Develop. The other founding members of London Venture Partners are former Atari CEO David Gardner on drums, former EA VP David Lau-Kee on the ivories and investment banking guru Paul Heydon on vocals.

The super-group are ‘œnot yet ready to make a public announcement on the business’ but Harrison and Gardner have previous ties with Atari’s plan to become a leading force in digital distribution, before Namco Bandai came and bought up most of the business, prompting them to leave. The whole team have also been involved in promoting the use of Unity, the super cross compatible game engine that’s opened up the iPhone to simple 3D game development, which has become free to indie developers.

Apparently they aim to target ‘œthe online, social, mobile and web game space’, which seems to cover just about everything then. Phil Harrison has certainly been a strong figurehead in the gaming world, and was certainly one of the first industry figures I became aware of as a blossoming man of the PlayStation era. Obviously it’s currently unclear how this “disruption” will manifest itself.

The fact they’ve planned to support mostly ‘œdisruptive’ projects suggests a reserved and calculated approach to creating disorder in the games industry. I get the image of Homer Simpson leaning out of the car with the megaphone in that episode where he becomes a hippy, or the executives of the clinically named London Venture Partners leaning back in their chairs excited about the possibility of F’ing some S’ up. It’ll be interesting to see anyway, coming from the man who demonstrated the raw power of the Cell chip way back in ’05 with a bath full of rubber duckies.

Via: CVG