FIFA 21 is getting released to the public in less than two weeks. One the most awaited gaming downloads of the year, Playstation is the reference when it comes to online gaming.
The history of playstation
Fifth-generation console, the PlayStation is Sony’s first home console, becoming a social phenomenon that propelled Sony as an undisputed manufacturer in the gaming world. However, Sony’s entry into the video game market has seen many ups and downs, and its home console almost never saw the light of day.
Ken Kutaragi was at the time an employee in the Research and Development department of the Japanese firm Sony. He was then stunned to see the human face made by a computer bearing the name of System G (Gazo for image in Japanese), system used at the time to achieve special effects on various television programs produced in Japan.
Seeing real potential, Ken Kutaragi began to think of this system for a completely different medium, however more or less linked to that of television: the world of video games. However, Sony was still a long way from being seen as a multinational company that develops home consoles at that time.
In 1984 a crisis is hitting the gaming world hard. Sony therefore takes a very negative view of the video game market, finding it unprofitable, and they reject the revolutionary idea of Ken Kutaragi. We find Ken Kutaragi a few years later, still with his idea of transposing the G system into the world of video games, but it is not to Sony that he is heading, but to Nintendo.
They are working on a next generation of consoles (16 bits). Aware of this revolution, Nintendo therefore began to develop a new sound processor to equip such consoles. Ken Kutaragi was aware that Nintendo was developing a new processor and a few months earlier he had made a prototype called the SPC-700 processor. It will be called Super Famicom (Super Nintendo in Europe). Nintendo’s hegemony is confirmed!
A partnership between Sony and Nintendo
Sony, seeing this as a real opportunity to enter this completely new market, starts a partnership with Nintendo. This contract has a simple objective: to improve the Super Famicom. This new medium is none other than CDROM / XA, a derivative of the CD-Rom allowing the listening of sounds and the reading of images.
This project is codenamed “the SNES-CD project”. At the head of this partnership: Ken Kutaragi. So moving from an employee in the Research and Development sector of the Japanese firm to director of this project, Ken Kutaragi is developing several tests. Two prototypes are finally selected.
The first prototype is the one desired by Nintendo: a device that would take place directly under the Super Famicom. The second prototype offered the possibility of incorporating cartridges but also CD-Roms in the Nintendo console. This second prototype had the code name “the Play Station”!
However, internal conflicts began to arise. There is even talk of a Nintendo-initiated coup against Sony. Indeed, the president of Nintendo, Hiroshi Yamauchi, realizes that the contract signed three years rather offers a guarantee of size to Sony, as this contract stipulates that the games that will be released on this new device will all belong to Sony. Nintendo will therefore look to Europe and ally without anyone knowing with Philips, a Dutch technology company based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Sony: a revenge called PSX
Following this betrayal, Sony decided to develop its second prototype left in suspense by this contract previously binding them with Nintendo. Their intention is to present their prototype during the Tokyo International Electronic Show in 1991.
Ken Kutaragi is then overwhelmed. He alone is designated as responsible for this failure. He then talked to Sony president Norio Ogha about a new project. A third and last prototype, still with the same name, PSX, but with a major difference: the presence of System G, a system that models 3D textures in real time. So this is Ken Kataragi’s one, only, and last chance.
On the other hand, everything does not go as planned with Philips: the CD-Rom support is not exempt of defects. Philips encounters a bitter failure with its home console, the CD-I, which decides Nintendo to abandon CD-Rom support. Sony does not give up but leaves aside its second project which will have sold 200 copies in order to focus mainly on this third project incorporating System G.
Sony bought a studio that was unanimous at the time: Psygnosis, recognized for its talents as developers and which focused only on the computer market and in particular the Amiga. The first results gave Sony confidence and hope for a more or less optimistic future for the console. But it lacked a crucial element for the time: publishers!
Ken Kutaragi then abandons his manager’s cap to clothe that of a salesman. He knocked on all the doors of Japanese publishers and unveiled a technical demo of a dinosaur animated in 3D, thus extolling the prowess of System G. Two heavyweights that are Namco and Konami – completely convinced by this technical demonstration – decided to join Sony.
Marketing of the PSX
It was now necessary to show the whole world that Sony was a great company! It was therefore in 1994, during the Tokyo International Electronic Show, that the PSX was unveiled.
The public was won over by this new console and above all by its extraordinary capabilities! Sony’s new console, the PlayStation, was marketed with games such as Battle Arena Toshinden, Wipeout and Ridge Racer. The PlayStation will land in 1995 in the USA and Europe.
As a new console, the PlayStation needed to have an eye-catching logo. The management of the logo was entrusted to Manabu Sakamoto, and it was then with relentlessness and after multiple attempts that the famous PlayStation logo was finally created. Three colors were to appear: red, yellow and blue. Likewise, the letters P and S of PlayStation had to be part of the logo. The PlayStation controller also went through various stages before arriving at the official controller.
Like its controller and logo, the PlayStation’s philosophy was to develop its own identity far from its beginnings as a simple Super Nintendo peripheral.