Ken Kuturagi was the father of the PlayStationand served as president of SIE (Sony Interactive Entertainment) for three console generations. His departure from Sony came in 2007, a year before the launch of the PS3, a console that wasn’t nearly as successful as the PS2 and was on the verge of losing this generation’s war against the Xbox 360.

During his talk at the Tokyo Game Show last weekend, Ken Kuturagi talked a bit about the PlayStation’s past and said something very interesting about its early days. During the development phase of this console, they had to visit dozens of video game companies and developers. It defines it as a great memory, but it also ensures it “They weren’t interested.

When approached, they simply said that they shouldn’t do it, that other companies had tried it, and that none had succeeded. Most They told him that the PlayStation would be a failure.

The truth is that everything was quite logical with the situation at the time, Nintendo and SEGA dominated the video game console market and Panasonic and Atari crashed with their 3DO and Jaguar, Why would PlayStation be any different?

That’s a good question. Ken Kuturagi didn’t go into detail, but we all know that first The PlayStation was a huge successso much so that it completely toppled SEGA’s Saturn to unveil the Nintendo 64. It also laid the groundwork for the best-selling and most successful console in history for many years, the PS2.

The “failure” of the PlayStation 3 marked Ken Kuturagi’s downfall

The PS1 was a very successful console because internally it was a show of mastery and good work. Its performance, 3D capabilities, low price and ease of game development that this console offered were the keys that catapulted it to the top.

Ken Kuturagi was the lead engineer for this console and was also the lead engineer for the PS2 and PS3. The first was an even bigger success than the original model, but with the PS3 Japanese he made many mistakes which complicated not only its development and launch, but also relations with developers, as it was very difficult to really realize its potential.

As many of our readers know, the PS3 had a hardware configuration very complex and less versatile than the Xbox 360 and was also more expensive. It did not use a GPU architecture with unified shaders, its IBM Cell processor required extensive parallelization work, and its memory split between 256 MB RAM and 256 MB VRAM was less flexible than the Xbox 360’s 512 MB unified configuration.

It is estimated that the launch of the PS3 cost Sony a large amount of money. Despite the high price, the console sold at a significant loss, and as I said, it was very close to losing the war of its generation against the Xbox 360. The two were so close in sales that we could almost say they closed with technical tie.