Part console, part discount DVD player, the
PlayStation 2 became a record-breaking success
(AFP/Getty)Yet even as the original PlayStation became a smash, Kutaragi was looking to the future. It is said that the
week the PS1 was released he was already drawing up plans for a second console.
It would have to be more powerful, he knew. With the PlayStation, Sony had produced a more
accomplished package than the Sega Saturn or the N64. Sony had also won the marketing war with a savvy
and often surreal advertising campaign.
But it couldn’t rest on its accomplishments, especially with rumours swirling that none other than software
giant Microsoft was thinking of getting into gaming. Clearly, there was room for one newcomer in a sector
historically dominated by Nintendo and Sega. But two?
As with the lead-up to the PlayStation launch, Kutaragi was not one for taking prisoners at Sony. Superiors
recalled him speaking to them as if they worked for him, rather than the other way around. In one key
meeting with Sony North America executives, two senior members of the company’s board, who had flown
in from Tokyo, found themselves reduced to translating for Kutaragi as he laid out his vision for where the
PS2 would take Sony.
The resonances continue to this day. Sam Mendes’s Oscar-nominated 1917, for instance, is essentially a
first-person shooter
His big idea – the one that arguably secured victory for Sony in this latest round of the console wars – was
to bundle a DVD player with the PS2. At the time, DVDs were the hot new format. But players were
horrendously expensive, with an entry-level device costing around £600.
At less than half that price, the PS2 was the perfect stealth technology. Now parents had a justification for
shelling out on one for their kids. And kids had a legitimate cause to lobby their parents to spring for a
games machine: it could play movies too!
Kutaragi also pushed the company to make a great fuss about the PS2’s “Emotion Engine” – a processing
unit tailored to running sophisticated 3D games. The other unique selling point was backwards
compatibility. With some exceptions, you could play your old PlayStation faves on the new console.