Everyone knows how the PlayStation story goes. Sony teamed up with Nintendo, only to be betrayed onstage at CES when the Mario company announced a partnership with Philips instead. But PlayStation’s founder, Ken Kutaragi, didn’t see Nintendo’s console as a rival. He saw it as something that needed ‘fixing.’ In NHK’s documentary New Project X: The Game Console Revolution by Mavericks, Kutaragi recalled how tinkering with an NES made him believe he could build something even better.
During the interview, the host Yoshio Arima described Kutaragi’s first encounter with the Famicom — or NES outside of Japan — as ‘fateful.’ He even bought one before his kids could ask for it. “Press a button, instant response. Pop in a cart, and immediately, beep beep boop boop, the game runs,” Kutaragi recalled being impressed before immediately taking it apart.
“But that’s a product made by another company, isn’t it?” asked Arima. Kutaragi simply replied. “Even if it belongs to someone else — no, it’s not ‘someone else’s.’ We all live with and use these things.”
“If a rice cooker is hard to use, you’d naturally think, ‘Why does this thing work like this?’ You feel like you should be able to fix it. No, not should — you can.” Then Kutaragi added, “In the end, progress is continuous innovation, not just improvement.”
That mindset eventually led him to collaborate with Nintendo. First, he worked on the SNES’s sound chip, then he proposed a joint project: Nintendo PlayStation. But the much-hyped SNES CD-ROM add-on project fell apart, and Kutaragi was furious. Still, he eventually saw a silver lining in said betrayal.
“In a way, it was an opportunity,” he recalled. “We didn’t have to work on Nintendo’s platform. We could aim at the whole computer entertainment turf and start a completely new project on our terms.”
Kutaragi gathered a small internal team and, joined by Toshiba engineer Masahide Ohashi, they rebuilt the PlayStation hardware from scratch. Not long, they faced an uphill battle — convincing software developers to actually support it. Unfortunately, many weren’t impressed as Sony is a newcomer to the gaming industry.
“Come back after you sell three million units,” added Masakazu Suzuoki, then Deputy Senior VP of Sony’s Semiconductor Division.
Thankfully, Namco decided to take a chance. The arcade giant also wanted to enter the home console market, and its early support inspired others. Soon, sixty companies — around three hundred developers — had joined the cause. When PlayStation launched in Japan in December 1994, all 100,000 units Sony had prepared sold out instantly.
The rest, of course, is gaming history. The documentary ends on a touching note, dedicating the episode to Ohashi, who passed away from cancer in February 1996. New Project X can be watched on NHK’s website, provided you have a Japanese IP address and are subscribed to NHK Plus.
