Andre Yoskowitz
26 Apr 2009 21:11
EDGE has made available this week a very interesting article on the origins of the original Sony PlayStation console which is a good read for fans of gaming, Sony, or history in general.
"This is a story that isn’t just about the design of an object made from silicon, plastic and metal. Nor is it just the story of the corporate politics that allowed the project to commence. It’s also the story of sales forces and distribution systems, of marketing strategies and product evangelists, of a confluence of social, economic and technological circumstances that allowed it to thrive. It’s about the vision behind the piece of hardware that pushed videogames into 3D and a veteran yet wide-eyed technology corporation into an industry that it would transform.
And it’s a vision that rose out from the rubble of a very public disaster. At the Consumer Electronics Show in June 1991, Sony revealed to the world a videogame console on which it had jointly worked with Nintendo. This SNES with a built-in CD-ROM drive was a project driven by Ken Kutaragi, a Sony executive who had come out of its hardware engineering division. It was to be Nintendo’s route into a brave new world of multimedia, and a way for Kutaragi to show his company how important the videogame industry could be. But the very day after Sony’s announcement, Nintendo declared that it would be breaking its deal with Sony by partnering with Philips instead..."
Read the entire article here: The Making of PlayStation