According to PlayStation creator Ken Kutaragi, 30 years ago everyone thought they would fail.
Ken Kutaragi, the creator of PlayStation, revealed that 30 years ago he had difficulty convincing both game developers and his bosses at Sony that this revolutionary console would be successful. Kutaragi told AFP The Birth Story of PlayStation “Everyone said we would fail,” he said in an interview about the project.
The Birth Story of PlayStation: It’s Now a Giant
Launched on December 3, 1994, PlayStation attracted attention with its revolutionary 3D graphics and games appealing to adults such as “Tomb Raider” and “Metal Gear Solid”. At the time, game consoles like Nintendo’s NES were considered “child’s play” and CGI was rarely used, even in Hollywood.
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“Most Sony executives were strongly opposed to the project, fearing it would tarnish the company’s image as a high-end electronics manufacturer,” Kutaragi noted. Japanese game developers also kept their distance from the project on the grounds that it seemed impossible to create real-time 3D games. But Kutaragi was determined: “We wanted to create a new form of entertainment using technological progress.”
This determination paid off. Having reached its 5th generation today, PlayStation is now a giant in the console industry. PlayStation 2 became the best-selling game console of all time with 160 million units.
Kutaragi also touched upon the cooperation and competition between Sony and Nintendo. The story of the duo, who parted ways due to the CD-ROM reader project, was seen as a betrayal and humiliation for Sony. However, Kutaragi emphasized that the separation was inevitable due to different approaches and that PlayStation would not have existed if this event had not occurred.
Stating that the new distribution model developed by Sony using its experience in the music industry played a key role in PlayStation’s success, Kutaragi left the company after the launch of PlayStation 3 in 2007. The 74-year-old engineer, who currently runs a robotics and artificial intelligence startup, believes that in the future, artificial intelligence will revolutionize many fields, and over time, space will become computable beyond video games.