This week marked the 25th anniversary of Sony’s original PlayStation, a bet that has become an undeniable success for the company. Since then, the PlayStation console family has sold more than 430 million copies. But in the 90s, Sony went almost another way in its entry into the games industry.
For the anniversary, we decided to look back on what could have been.
The Nintendo deal
PlayStation was largely the brainchild of the engineer and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment and chairman Ken Kutaragi, whose interest in video games stems from his daughter playing games on the NES family in the mid-1980s. Seeing her play with the NES released as Famicom in Japan, he ignited a spark in Kutaragi’s brain and began to see how popular video games would become in the future.
Kutaragi was later given the opportunity to work with Nintendo to develop the sound chip of the Super Nintendo. Kutaragi made the deal with Nintendo without the knowledge of his superiors at Sony, a decision that angered them. His work was saved only by the then CEO of Sony Norio Ohga, who enabled the engineer to finish his work on the highly respected SPC700 Soundchip.
The successful partnership led to further collaboration between Sony and Nintendo – this time with a disc-based add-on for the Super Nintendo. But on both sides Kutaragi was not much supported. Despite the success of the Nintendo and Sega consoles at the time, many at Sony saw video games as a fad, rather than an industry worth pursuing. At Nintendo, the decision to print games on CD-ROMs that differed from the then-common cassette was skeptical, although CD-ROMs could hold much more memory than cassettes.
Nevertheless, Kutaragi set to work to create a prototype for the disc-based add-on, then called the “Play Station”. In a famous, often misdirected story, Nintendo returned to its business, announcing its partnership with Sony and the announcement had instead made a deal with Phillips.
The Sega speaks
Despite his determination, Kutaragi turned to Nintendo’s then biggest rival in the video game industry, Sega, and talked about possible collaboration on a disc-based console. After his highly successful Sega Genesis console, which was similar to Sony, Sega had considered the use of CD-ROMs for video games and had first released an accessory for the Genesis, the Sega CD, before a pure CD console was targeted , The two parties had also worked together in the past when Sony Imagesoft, a subsidiary of Sony Music, had released eight games for the Sega CD.
“We kept it a secret, while the fiasco between Nintendo and Sony was widely known and public.”
Under the direction of Kutaragi, former head of hardware development and later president of Sega Hideki Sato, the two parties spent several months exploring what a CD-based Sega Sony console would look like and whether the two companies would actually partner. But early on Kutaragi had cold feet when working with Sega.
“We kept it a secret while the Nintendo Sony fiasco was widely known and publicized,” Shinobu Toyoda, former COO and executive vice president of Sega of America, told Polygon in an interview last year about possible collaboration.
Shuji Utsumi, former Vice President for Product Acquisition at SCEA, who worked with Kutaragi on the potential partnership with Sega, said in an interview for a recent Polygon documentary on PlayStation’s 25th anniversary, Sony had decided that this time it would be the reverse , And that happened so early in the process. Utsumi said when Kutaragi would return from meetings with Sato and Sega’s US Department, he already told staff that he was unlikely to accept the offer. “In the end he was not.”
“From then on, we thought about what we needed to do to create a system ourselves – what were the challenges, what were the costs and what did we have to do. From there, we started planning, “said Utsumi.
Sony is alone
To get what he wanted, Kutaragi just had to do one simple thing: make his boss angry. The two had a meeting and Kutaragi planned a Sony made video game console. It would end when Ohga got angry and Kutaragi finally got the green light he was after.
“Ken’s career went from almost zero [to the operation of Sony Computer Entertainment].”
Kutaragi had to convince Ohga – the man who saved his job years ago – that video games were an industry where Sony had to be. The meeting would become a legendary story. “There was a meeting with only maybe eight people. No other executives, “said Utsumi in an earlier interview with Polygon about the appointment of the CEO. “It was just Kutaragi’s team setting up Ohga, and Ohga was personally interested in the project.”
To bring his message home, Kutaragi Ohga recalled the failed partnership with Nintendo and asked him if he would sit back and accept what the company did to Sony. This reminder was enough to upset Ohga, the Kutaragi, according to the legend, said, “Join us. Do it. This is a project that Sony needs to be involved in. “
“Ken’s career went from almost zero [to the actual direction of Sony Computer Entertainment],” Utsumi said of the meeting.
With the launch of Ohga supervised Kutaragi the development of the original PlayStation. The console was released in December 1994 and September 1995 in Japan and the US respectively. It sold more than 102 million times and beat many times the consoles of its competitors, the Nintendo 64 and the Sega Saturn.
. Microsoft?
Despite the success of the first PlayStation, some executives at Sony saw no successor as a guaranteed profit. In 1999, when Kutaragi planned the PlayStation 2, he was invited to a meeting with Microsoft’s Bill Gates by Nobuyuki Idei, Ohga’s successor as chairman of Sony.
The meeting, which was held in secret in May 1999, was discussed by teams from Sony and Microsoft about the possibilities of jointly building an online video game console, according to a 2002 Wall Street Journal report, based on interviews with numerous Sony executives to bring the market. According to the report, the companies met at least once in July 1999, but the talks soon ended. The details of the meetings are sparse. The Wall Street Journal reports that neither Microsoft nor Kutaragi would comment on why they were terminated. However, Idei told Gates, “I do not control Ken Kutaragi.”
Next year, just a few days after Sony released the PlayStation 2, Microsoft announced its own video game console – the original Xbox. The two companies began a fierce rivalry for console dominance.
Over the last 25 years, Sony’s failed partnership with Nintendo has become a major chapter in the history of the gaming industry. For the people who were there, it was also a “what if” scenario, a hypothetical scenario in which the industry’s largest consoles never came out. The potential collaborations of Sony with Sega and Microsoft, however, are less
Whether one of these cooperations would have been fruitful or not can not be judged. 25 years and 430 million units later, Sony’s decision was a complete success in and of itself.
