Hermen Hulst hasn’t been head of PlayStation Studios for long, only taking over the position from gaming industry veteran Shuhei Yoshida about a year and a half ago. However, in that time, he’s had to contend with a console launch, the complications of COVID-19 on game development, and helping studios launch some of Sony’s most successful and inventive games, such as The Last of Us Part II, Returnal, and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart.
PlayStation Studios is an international network of development studios creating gaming experiences. Hulst is tasked with leading the 12 internal studios under the banner and ensuring the developers have the resources and support they need. The list of talent includes industry juggernauts, such as Insomniac Games (Ratchet and Clank), Guerrilla Games (Horizon Zero Dawn), Sucker Punch (Ghost of Tsushima), Naughty Dog (Uncharted, The Last of Us), Santa Monica Studios (God of War), and Media Molecule (Dreams), to name a few.
Hulst lets his guard down at the Days Gone PSX booth
Before taking the position at PlayStation Studios, Hulst was no stranger to the trials and tribulations of game development and what it takes for a studio to be successful. He was previously managing director of Guerrilla Games, playing a key role in shaping the Killzone series and supporting the studio’s shift to its new flagship IP, Horizon Zero Dawn. But who is the new man leading the charge at PlayStation Studios? We sat down with Hulst to learn more about his life, gaming philosophies, and the path he sees forward to keep PlayStation Studios at the top of its game.
Finding Gaming
Hulst grew up in the Netherlands, which wasn’t exactly a hot spot for video games, but he still found a way to the hobby thanks to his mom’s toy store. “I actually grew up in the Bible Belt, where there weren't any arcades,” Hulst says. “Luckily for me, [my mom’s toy store] had a Vectrex [game console] that had Mine Storm pre-installed. I must have been about nine or ten and I was pretty competitive, but I loved playing.” Hulst would watch the older, more seasoned players, then after the store closed for the day, he would sneak in after dinner to work on getting his initials on the high-score list. Hulst recalls just loving “the intensity” and losing himself for hours on end until it was bedtime.
Hulst cut his teeth playing arcade games, but soon expanded his horizons and now considers himself a jack-of-all trades – not being attached to any genre or series. “I play different things,” he says. “I am not a gamer that can be pigeonholed in one particular area.” Hulst often finds himself playing whatever aligns with his current area of focus in game development. “As a gamer now, it's really hard to not be a game designer or a game maker when you do what I do,” he explains. “I’ve gone through phases where I've played a ton of shooters, and there, I'm thinking about the concept of the power fantasy and the theater of war that you're in. Then I went through that whole phase where everything became about freedom of choice and agency and exploration when we moved with my old studio at Guerrilla Games from the Killzone days to the Horizon days.”
Hulst says he thinks about things very conceptually concerning designers’ intentions when he plays games, but he also gets those nostalgic feelings from his gaming childhood, too. He points to Housemarque’s Returnal as a recent game that gave him the best of both worlds. “When I pick up Returnal, I go straight back to that old experience on the Vectrex,” he says. “But then, I think, ‘Wow, so this is a very arcadey experience, but somehow we found a way to get a layered story on top of that.”
In Hulst’s eyes, what makes a good, interesting game is in line with what PlayStation excels at. “I say this as the head of PlayStation Studios, and that's kind of the games we’re known for – a very meticulously crafted, beautifully directed story that takes place in a world that is really inviting to spend time in,” he says. “That's some of the most joy I’ve had in games. That definitely speaks to that single-player, narrative-driven, character-based experience that I’ve worked on a lot myself, that I now work on with a lot of the great studios at PlayStation Studios.”
He’s as calm as Aloy! Hulst enjoys a walk with Horizon Zero Dawn's infamous Watcher
The Road To PlayStation Studios
Just like how Hulst didn’t have a lot of access to video games growing up in the Netherlands, neither were there opportunities to pursue a career in gaming. “I come from the Netherlands, and the games industry wasn’t necessarily, in the mid-’90s, considered to be a proper career,” he says. “There wasn’t actually such a thing as game development or game publishing for that matter that you could get into.” When it came time to decide on his career path, Hulst pursued mechanical engineering and business management degrees at the University of Twente in Enschede, Netherlands, and later pursued a degree in philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. But once again, gaming would find him.
While completing his studies, he did an exchange program that landed him in California, and serendipity had its way as he met some people at Ubisoft, which led to him interning at the Ubisoft office in Sausalito. At the time, Hulst says there were only seven or eight people working out of that office and its members were primarily focused on Rayman and racing games. “I kind of worked as a researcher,” he says. “These days we have entire PhD-filled teams on user testing and consumer insights, but that was the job I had.” Hulst said his main area of research was platformers and racing games, and he would go to schools and recruit people to answer questions like, “What is the magic behind Mario Kart?”
Hulst’s job was to essentially “unpack what made a game great,” and he instantly fell in love with it. It allowed him to not only think about the appeal of games and what worked about them, but also hear from other people’s insights. Because the team was so small at the time, Hulst also worked a bit on the marketing side, most notably helping with the marketing plan in North America for Rayman.
It was a fun time in Hulst’s life, which he still looks back on fondly. Unfortunately, once he returned to the Netherlands, the gaming opportunities still weren’t there, so he worked as a strategy consultant until about 2000 when things started to take shape in what would become Guerrilla Games, the studio he co-founded and would stay at for 18 years. Even back then, his ambitions were big: “We decided, ‘Let’s go build this thing out. Let's try to become the best studio in Europe.’” The rest is history. Guerrilla Games made a name for itself with the Killzone series, then surprised many by taking a chance on a new IP and genre with Horizon Zero Dawn, which catapulted the studio to new heights.