Shahid Ahmad has brought many indie games to the PlayStation platform over the years during his tenure as the Director of Strategist Content for Sony Computer Entertainment Europe. The independent games he helped bring to PlayStation include No Man’s Sky, Hellblade, Robinson: The Journey, Volume, Nuclear Throne, Hotline Miami, and plenty more. Having been with Sony Europe for 10 years, he will be leaving on December 1st, 2015. He started his career back in 1982 as a coder (I was just getting born that year), self-publishing his first game in that same year. He went on to design Chimera and Pandora, the former of which he remastered back in 2012.
Shahid Ahmad said in a blog post “I want to make games again. I stopped being a developer around a quarter of a century ago and have seen so many changes since then, with most of the exciting ones happening in the last few years. I want to be part of that.” He has also reassured fans in his blog post, saying that “Strategic Content will continue. There are no plans to change anything. Our approach to developers will also be unchanged. We have many talented people across the board who work tirelessly to support developers in bringing their video games to PlayStation.” So hopefully his departure won’t affect PlayStation fans in Europe too much.
This will undoubtedly be a big and interesting new step in life for Shahid Ahmad, and we hope the next chapter in his life will be full of fun and challenges for him. I can say from experience that coding can be a very challenging, but also very rewarding job or hobby. Hopefully he will be very successful in whatever new endeavors he him finds himself involved in with his future work.