SIE Japan Studio

Japan Studio was Sony's in-house development studio in Tokyo. It grew out of Sony Computer Entertainment, set up in Tokyo on 16 November 1993 by Sony and Sony Music Entertainment Japan; the Japan Studio name arrived in 2005. In its early years it was run much like the record label, with producers finding creative talent and helping it make games such as NanaOn-Sha's PaRappa the Rapper and Camelot's Everybody's Golf. One of its teams, Polys Entertainment, made Gran Turismo (1997), whose success led to it being spun off as Polyphony Digital.

Shuhei Yoshida ran the company from 1996 to 2000, building teams such as Sugar & Rockets, Arc Entertainment and Contrail, which were folded in in 2000. Its internal teams created Ape Escape and The Legend of Dragoon (1999). Fumito Ueda's Team Ico made Ico (2001) and Shadow of the Colossus (2005), while Keiichiro Toyama's Team Gravity, formed by former Silent Hill developers, made Siren (2003) and later Gravity Rush (2012). In 2005 it moved under SCE Worldwide Studios as Japan Studio; its first PlayStation 3 game was Genji: Days of the Blade (2006).

It struggled to produce hits during the PlayStation 3 era, although those years brought LocoRoco (2006), Patapon (2007) and Demon's Souls (2009), which appears in its catalogue. Yoshida took full control in 2008, and Sony brought in Allen Becker from Santa Monica Studio, who led the studio from 2011: he cancelled the weakest of some forty projects in development and adopted the methods of Sony's Western studios. The results included Puppeteer, Rain and Knack (2013). Bloodborne (2015) and The Last Guardian (2016) followed, the latter finished after Ueda had left to found genDesign.

Team Asobi, set up by Nicolas Doucet in 2012, handled the Astro Bot series, with Astro Bot Rescue Mission (2018) and Astro's Playroom (2020). Several veterans left in 2020 and 2021, among them Toyama, who founded Bokeh Game Studio. Sony announced that from 1 April 2021 Japan Studio would be re-centred around Team Asobi to build on the popularity of Astro's Playroom. The studio was merged into Team Asobi and other SIE studios, and Team Asobi, its successor, moved into PlayStation Studios in June 2021.