During the early ’90s, Ken Kutaragi and Sony attempted to collaborate with Nintendo on an early version of PlayStation, which was intended as a CD drive for the SNES. When that partnership faltered, Kutaragi and Sony moved forward with the original PlayStation in 1994. Although that system ultimately changed the entire video game industry, Kutaragi still recalls the doubters both inside and outside of Sony 25 years later.
“We wanted to share the passion,” said Kuturagi at the Tokyo Games Show via VGC. “We wanted to hear their expectations and what they did not expect, so we wanted to hear from them. So we visited dozens of companies if not hundreds, we visited a lot of game makers. It was a great memory. They were not interested. They just said, ‘Don’t do it. There were multiple companies and none of them were successful. You are going to fail.’ That’s what they told us.”
It’s understandable why not everyone shared Kuturagi’s passion for the project. When PlayStation entered the market, Nintendo and Sega were the only two dominant console-makers. Sony may have had more powerful hardware than the Genesis, the SNES, or the 32X peripheral, but Sega’s Saturn was launching at right around the same time. And if that system had caught on like Sony’s PS, then the console wars may have turned out very differently.
Microsoft had a similar experience in 2001 when it had to follow Sega’s Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 into the market. Sega soon exited the console scene, leaving Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft as the major players in the industry. Through four successive console generations, Sony remains one of the most dominant companies in video games. And it all started because Kutaragi and his team had a vision for the future of gaming.
