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Games Books Media Book Reviews Entertainment

The Making of PlayStation 60

Posted by JonKatz from the -the-renegades-who-made-PS- dept.
Reiji Asakura's Revolutionaries at Sony: The Making of the Sony PlayStation and the Visionaries Who Conquered the World of Video Games is an authorized account of how some renegade Sony programmers and engineers battled one another and their own corporate hierarchy to create the PlayStation. The rest is history. This book is an interesting if worshipful yarn, and one of the few book-length accounts ever published about the corporate politics inside of the video-game arena. (Read more)

The Making of the Sony PlayStation
author Reiji Asakura
pages 230
publisher McGraw Hill
rating 6/10
reviewer Jon Katz
ISBN 0-07-135587-1
summary How gaming engineers convinced Sony to make the PlayStation

You can hardly overstate the success of the PlayStation home game machines, even though Asakura, a Japanese journalist who was granted unlimited access to Sony engineers and executives, comes close a few times.

The first PS had annual sales of more than $7 billion after only four years; total worldwide shipments as of September, l998 exceeded 40 million units. And that doesn't include the PS2, released last year.

Sony's engineers transformed gaming as well as cornered the market on one of the most lucrative technologies ever. In l999, Sony Computer Entertainment's contribution to Sony's consolidated profits reached 23%. The PlayStation, says Asakura, is at the heart of Sony's success and represents one of the most successful engineering, programming and marketing triumphs in business history.

The interesting part of this book is the look at the politics and strategizing that goes on inside a hi-tech global entertainment corporation. At first, Ken Kutaragi's plan -- Kutaragi is without doubt the hero of this story -- to engineer a revolutionary new type of gaming console was ignored or resisted. Sony, he was told, wasn't interested in the "toy" business. The decision-making processes of a corporation like this, and the tensions between corporate and technical people are pretty interesting. So is Asakura's account of the cultural and business differences between Japan and America that dogged the marketing and distribution of the PlayStation.

Be warned, though. This is an authorized and nearly worshipful biography of Kutaragi, and in many ways, of Sony itself. The politics and technical details of the making of the PS will be interesting to many, but this is hardly a detached, outsider look.

You can purchase this book at FatBrain.
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The Making of Playstation More

The Making of Playstation

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  • L998!? (Score:1)

    by Trak ( 670 )
    what's up with the mangled years?
  • That was hella cool.

    (Moderators, I have a +1, and didn't use it. Consider this post already modded down.)
    The real Threed's /. ID is lower than the real Bruce Perens'.

    --Threed
  • *Sigh* For the goat afraid:

    http://www.joystick101.org/?op=displaystory&sid= 20 00/12/23/19945/112
  • It seems to me that every generation of games there is a new king on the block. Maybe perhaps with the exception of Nintendo from the 8 bit era to the 16 bit era of console gaming.

    I say maybe because I don't know who won the sales war back in the 16 bit gaming days.

    What I do find amusing is that in almost every generation, the machine that comes out on top isn't necesarily the most powerful bang for the buck.

    Coleco was definitely more powerful than the Atari 2600, and comperably priced, but Atari won.

    The Sega Master System was technologically better than the Nintendo, but it lost early.

    Of the Genesis, SNES, TG16, Jaguar... all systems that around 1991-1993 or so were fairly comperable in price (heck got so bad they were giving the Jaguars away), the Jaguar was arguably the most technically superior per-se, but it had no games, so no one bought it. The SNES had a slower processor but a higher color count, plus it had mario, so it probably won.

    Then we have the Playstation, Saturn, N64 era... where N64 and Saturn fall hard to the might of the Sony Playstation. Even though the saturn and N64 had better hardware. True the N64 crippled itself by being a cartrige based system... but...

    So we're walking into the era of PS2, Dreamcast, X-box, GameCube (whatever they're calling that these days). Of course, we all know that Dreamcast has already lost. The interesting thing will be watching Microsoft duke it out with Sony, I think. Certainly, both companies have a lot of money with which to fight a war. And when two gaming companies get into a war, the real winners will be the consumers, I think.

    Though I own one of the first original playstations to hit US shores, I didn't buy a PS2 because I'm dismayed at how Sony is treating the 3rd party developers this time around. Now that they are no longer the upstart, they think they can make people play by their rules. Ah well. I can't wait to watch the war... ;)
  • This one is even funnier:

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/media/398.gif [theregister.co.uk]

    And no, it's not a goatse.cx [goatse.cx] link either.

    --

  • Nice job, bravo. :-)

    Later,
    ErikZ
  • uhhhhh. ok.

    this article is about sony and the playstation, not "Sony -vs- The World"

    and nintendo never was any good :)
  • the "dvd-drive" itself is not specifically for movie playing

    playstation games are recorded to dvd-rom's. i guess their reasoning behind this is that dvd's hold alot more and not many ppl can duplicate dvd's these days

    as for the usb.. im not sure if the playstation has an internal modem or not but i guess they are for expandability, ie. modem/broadband/ethernet for networked gameplay?

    correct me if im wrong, i havnet read much on the PS2
  • The PSX handles sprites quite well, and the later games show it (Guilty Gear, SFA3, Mega Man X4/5.). The big problem with sprites on the PSX was that many of the early sprite based games were poorly optimized and suffered from terrible slowdown (Castlevania, SoTN), which was usually corrected in the Satrun versions, as they tended to ship months or even years later.

    The Saturn's real advantage over the PSX with sprites was the RAM add-on, which allowed the Saturn to handle all of the animations in arcade ports. The PSX had to drop a lot of extra stuff, which killed games like MvC.
  • Actually, the N64 handles sound quite well, at CD quality. It was just unable to store long tracks, and instead used sythesized sounds for music. Because most N64 games were geared toward children, great music was not a priority.

    Check out the music in Castlevania 64 or Wipeout 64 for some great examples of incredible game music.
  • "Saturn DID NOT use the NV1 though and didn't produce quads"

    Yes it did. The Saturn was an all quads machine. Go pick up a used Saturn and some 3D Saturn games, they are all quads with a few exceptions that used rendering tricks to produce triangle rather inefficiently.

    "The fact is that there is no PS1 game that cannot be equaled visually by the N64, given the storage"

    Go compare Quake II for the N64 with Quake II for the Playstation. Both ports were done by the same people, and the playstation version blows the N64 version away, because of the detail. Effects might be nice, but not if all of the models look like crap because there are not enoigh polygons.

  • That is absolutely hillarious!
  • ...and why it failed"?? I would be interested...

    Anybody can give us links to some good stuff about the history of the gaming industry (consoles) and not only about Sony?

  • Judging by sales figures [ign.com], Nintendo is the king.

    Sure, 90% of their sales might come from GameBoy, but that only goes to further show that the only company that has a true, long term lock on the Video Game market, was, is, and shall be Nintendo.

    Sony was a late comer that never dethroned anyone. They never revolutionized a thing, except perhaps by bringing a bit more mature content to console video games, and quality pre-rendered CG (via CDROM capacity).

    Then in their own self-delusion, they unleased that monstrosity known as the PS2. They bought their own hubris and are doomed to choke on it.

    Funny how the american media seems to believe that the platform war is between Sony and Microsoft and never give The N any airtime. Utterly delusional.

    -- kwashiorkor --
    Leaps in Logic
    should not be confused with

  • one of the few book-length accounts ever published about the corporate politics inside of the video-game arena

    I beg to differ. "Joystick Nation" by JC Herz comes to mind immediately. The magazine Next-Generation (back in the day) ran many articles on the industry's history (I've got several with the history of Yamuchi-san of Nintendo and the Pong fiasco). Steven L. Kent, who wrote articles for Next-Gen also wrote "The First Quarter : A 25-year History of Video Games".

    I'm sure I'm missing many books, especially books in Japanese - since it seems that the nation would have many on the mega corporations.

  • Like it Dave. Where's the sound though? ;)

    On a related issue, shouldn't you like be taking your finals and not doing amusing animated gifs for slashdot consumption?

  • Let's think about this...

    Microsoft
    Intel
    nVidia


    And you don't think this PC-in-a-Box will have bugs?



  • Funny you should say that... The Gameboy has recently broken 100 million unit sales, and it's been out for over a decade. The Playstation has been out for almost half that time yet has sold over 75 million units.

  • Thanks. Now I have to clean my keybard aftr yur ZW gg made me spll m Cke ll vr t.
  • This reveals the danger of quoting from memory. Quotes tend to devolve over time.

    I remember the first time I heard a certain quote, it was:
    Better to be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.

    The last time I heard the same quote it had devolved into something like:

    It's better to keep your mouth shut, and let people think you're stupid, than to say something and confirm it.

    I'm not sure what the original version is. I've never been able to find it in a dictionary of quotations, but I find the former far more elegant, and am therefore inclined to think it's closer to the original. I've been hearing ever more mangled versions over the years.
  • It's an animated GIF, probably used to be cross-platform compatible. Animated GIF's don't have sound.

    but really... is sound needed? I liked the primitiveness of it. not all flashy

  • First he says:

    "You can hardly overstate the success of the PlayStation home game machines"

    Then he shows us all how easy it is:

    "...represents one of the most successful engineering, programming and marketing triumphs in business history."

    One strong Chritmas season is hardly a marketing "triumph"... that's just barely enough to put it in the same class as the Cabbage Patch dolls (which were hot-ticket gift items for two years in a row).

    It's a game console. It's just a game console; not even really that good of one. By this time next year, nobody on Earth will care about the PS2 anymore.

  • I agree. The Dreamcast is a great console and should have at least reigned the second place slot (yeah, like it could even think of beating PS2, but it's a great little machine) for a while. I was one of the schmucks who stood in line on 9/9/99 to get that thing. I guess Sega's new corporate motto is "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em." instead of "It's thinking..".

    -----
  • On a related issue, shouldn't you like be taking your finals and not doing amusing animated gifs for slashdot consumption?

    Oh, now you have to come and spoil my day by mentioning f***als. :)

    And it's bad enough having it a 200kb GIF without some format that allows sound. :)

    Anyway, you could have asked me on IRC... we are chatting there after all :-P

  • *sigh* does it count as biting to reply to that by printing the link as text?

    http://dave.magd.ox.ac.uk/katz.gif

    Of course, I can't prove it's not the goatse.cx picture called katz.gif... (but it isn't :-)

  • dada The first PS had annual sales of more than $7 billion after only four years; total worldwide shipments as of September, l998 exceeded 40 million units. And that doesn't include the PS2, released last year.

    The only reason that they probably didn't add the PS2 sales was because they only released a couple thousand :)

    I think sony made a big mistake in making the PS2 the way they did. I mean they only release a small portion of the demand I wonder if that is in this new book cause that really pisses me off. A while ago I read that they couldn't afford to put 2 more controller ports but the new PS2 has 2 usb ports and a dvd??? what does dvd movie playing have to do with a video game conceal they should have sold it as an entertainment unit instead. It would have at least made me a little more happy. I also read in enough place that the video card doesn't have allot of ram. I dunno if that one is true because I had never heard of the source before some /. post. But tht would really suck on the frame rate

    Hope this isn't too much flame bait. I think that PS2 is good but it shouldn't have been marketed as a video conceal system

  • They are for expantion you are right but not for an external modem. Because as far as all my friends who have bought one say is that there is a slot for a modem that you have to buy after unlike dreamcast.

    The other thing is that there are other ways of getting that much storage without using dvd's and having to spend 200 more dollers on the systems creation. they basicly used it as a sales gimic. The dreamcast used GD-Roms that hold about 1.2gig er something like that and are extreamly hard for the average person to rip. you have to basicly hook your computer up to your dreamcast via usb.

    I never spell check :)
  • "At first, Ken Kutaragi's plan -- Kutaragi is without doubt the hero of this story -- to engineer a revolutionary new type of gaming console was ignored or resisted. Sony, he was told, wasn't interested in the "toy" business. The decision-making processes of a corporation like this, and the tensions between corporate and technical people are pretty interesting."

    This surprises me, as Sony is one of the very few multinational corporations that have been open to utilizing their massive resources to investigating alternative or previously unexplored arenas. The revelation that Sony was investigating extrasensory perception [forteantimes.com] in their very own ESPER psi-lab greatly increased my respect for them as open-minded, progressive scientists.

    Therefore I am surprised that Ken Kutaragi came up against such resistance within Sony. But then, it's an enormous organization and I guess the ESPER-type culture may not have been prevalent throughout.

    Asikaa

  • I can't imagine the DC History thing would be that interesting to be honest. A sordid tale of wasted opportunity due to a Sega's failure to make the DC as 'cool' as a PlayStation (sadly...) On the 'Links' front - I can recommend 2 books on the topic whole-heartedly however... Game Over by David Sheff The First Quarter by Steve Kent Both are tremendously entertaining and essential reading if Video Games are your 'thing'... TTFN JP
  • I loved joystick nation, even though it is a little dated now, but whats to be expected from an industry that revolutionizes it's technology every 2 years. i still read that book, ever since i got it for 3 bucks from the Borders Bargain section -The Unstablist
  • "Coleco was definitely more powerful than the Atari 2600, and comperably priced, but Atari won."

    The Atari 2600 was released in 1977. Colecovision was released in 1983. It's not surprising that Colecovision had superior technology. In any case, most of the 2600s were purchased before Colecovision existed.
  • Was that an actual book review? A few paragraphs? Ok I don't need the whole book recounted but that was weak.
  • "True the N64 crippled itself by being a cartrige based system.."

    That only crippled the N64 in regards to full motion video, which does little to actually enhance a game. Plenty of games went over quite well on the Playstation without video clips.

    It also crippled the N64 with regards to sound. The playstation supports cd quality audio, while N64 still has your bleeps and bloops. You'd never have something like Wipeout XL on the N64.
  • It was rather simple. I took some wood, some glue, and an old record player. Then I began to carefully craft a console. THEN.... My boss came in, and said that marketing requires it to be grey, not maple. I was upset, but agreeded to do it his way. The only problem was, that my other boss, "suggested" that we use a CD player, that was premanufactured by a subsiderary. Well, I explained that my version was classier, but she got upset and fired me.
  • I think you mean 'electronic' music? At least that's how I saw it in someone's .sig

  • Book Reviews (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If you liked that book, you'll love this one [amazon.com] by Hiroyuki Nishigaki. Here's the description (really) from the listing on Amazon.com:

    How to Good-Bye Depression: If You Constrict Anus 100 Times Everyday. Malarkey? or Effective Way?

    I think constricting anus 100 times and denting navel 100 times in succession everyday is effective to good-bye depression and take back youth. You can do so at a boring meeting or in a subway. I have known a 70-year-old man who has practiced it for 20 years. As a result, he has a good complexion and has grown 20 years younger. His eyes sparkle. He is full of vigor, happiness and joy. He has neither complained nor born a grudge under any circumstance. Furthermore, he can make #### three times in succession without drawing out.

    In addition, he also can have burned a strong, beautiful fire within his abdomen. It can burn out the dirty stickiness of his body, release his immaterial fiber or third attention, which has been confined to his stickiness. Then, he can shoot out his immaterial fiber or third attention to an object, concentrate on it and attain happy lucky feeling through the success of concentration.

    If you don't know concentration, which gives you peculiar pleasure, your life looks like hell.

    Buy the book! [amazon.com]
  • "Computer games don't affect kids. I mean if Pacman affected our generation as kids, we'd all run around in a darkened room munching pills and listening to repetitive music."
  • Phoenix was interesting, but very, very repetitive. Sections from early on in the book are repeated almost verbatium later on. But it does give a nice history of the 70's-80's gaming revolution. Mostly hardware focused. Little attention is given to software or full sized arcade games.

    I literally just started reading "Revolutionaries" this morning on the train to work. They writing style is kinda dry, but the first ten pages (short train ride) were interesting anyway.

    Pete
  • I avoid making this type of comment, but DAMN... That was FUNNY, man!
  • Where is the quote from? Can you at least tell me if the author was being insanely clever, or just clueless?
  • Nah, I thought it was pretty standard.
  • haha, you're telling me our generation isn't eating lots of pills and listening to repetitive music?

    --

  • I agree with many of your points, but I must insist that the Saturn did indeed render only quads. Not only that, but they were rendered in a funny way... Normally, the destination pixels would be rendered one at a time, and the corresponding texel would be fetched for each pixel. The Saturn iterated over the source texture, and stretched it over the destination, replicating texels as necessary.
    In addition, the textures (more accurately, "stretched sprites") were stored in a linear fashion rather than the PSX's 2D layout, and you couldn't skip texels at the end of each line. Essentially, you couldn't provide texture coordinates (although you could lie about the start position and height of the texture).
    This meant that you couldn't easily subdivide polygons (which would involve subdividing the texture coordinates) in the u direction. If you wanted to do this, you would have to copy out a slice of the texture.
  • The cost of the catridges was an issue yes, but what really kept developers away was the attitude of CEO Yamauchi, who insisted that the system be geared toward children. Aside Quake I/II and Perfect Dark, the system and games were always marketed toward the 9-17 year old boy market.

    At the same time the Playstation was booming with its adult (17+, such as intense RPGs, strategy/wargames, sports titles.) business. Adults have more money for games, and games for adults can more easily be ported to the PC for easy profit. Therefore it made little sense to produce N64 titles.

    After all, cartridge prices were jacked up to make up the difference, and N64 games still sold quite well.
  • "Or do you mean the adult games had another large market in PCs?"

    Exactly. Any console game can easily be ported to the PC, but the large adult market makes it easy to sell more copies.
  • I'm sorry, what were we talking about?
  • ...and one of the few book-length accounts ever published about the corporate politics inside of the video-game arena.
    Could that be because video game players have short attention spa....

    Ok...Ok...go around that corner...look! There's a book! Blast it! That blowed up real good!

  • The PSX has shown in the past that it's slow for sprites (slowdowns in a lot of places) and it's severely ram limited (MvC with no tag-team!?)
    ----
  • The Saturn did have a much, much, MUCH better sprite engine. Sprite games on the PSX generally suck (look at the crippled Marvel vs Capcom, for instance)
    ----
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Game Over was a great novel indeed, the updated version covers a bit of Nintendo's efforts after the SNES/SuperFamicom. It doesn't go into the N64's issues as much as I would have liked, but it's a nice addition.

    The author managed to keep a nice balance between Nintendo bashing and Nintendo worshipping. The business practices Nintendo engaged in, such as the cartridge building process, were just absolutely insane. Scary thing is, they're still on top in many ways. International video game sales, the top hardware and software sales belong to Nintendo.. by far. Granted, it's got Zelda and Pokemon to back them up.

    The book touches on the Playstation, and Nintendo's efforts to combat Sony's prodigy. It's definately worth reading the updated version of Game Over if you enjoyed the first version and read the making of PS.

  • I mean, we all know that Kutaragi has had a rough time to put his Playstation on track. Everybody knows he was first producing sound hardware elements for Nintendo, and gradually added to his inventory of usuable parts until his machine was sort-of "conceived". On itself, it`s a bit like Jobs and his Apple. It`s an achievement, a milestone. But if you look in IBM`s history I think you`ll find many of these kinds of achievements, and no one will give a rats-ass about the people behind them.

    Putting a whorship-book together on the details of this story is probably another attempt to help playstation II fend off the X-Box. Now we can even believe that Sony, as short-sighted as their management probably is, will still make the 'right' decisions for us happy bunch, so we should stick with them. Don`t buy it folks, you won`t learn anything from this "success' story. I bet the book doesn`t mention the number of malfunctioning PSII`s out there.

  • Short attention span eh???? You've not played any videogames recently then... Personally, my spare-time has been swallowed whole by Phantasy Star Online of recent - 82 hours in 18 days... Short attention span eh???
  • Well, even if a lot of PS2's malfunction, just you wait until the Xbox ships. Would you trust version 1.0 of MS anything? I can't wait until the BSOD becomes part of the gaming community.

    Seriously, though, I think Sony should be worried about the GameCube more than the Xbox. At least the GameCube will run instead of crash, and they have Mario and Link...

  • For a quick overview... (Score:3)

    by Eoli ( 320216 ) on Wednesday February 28, 2001 @06:24AM (#395279)
    CNN did an piece [cnn.com] on Mr. Kutaragi last September. It's interesting enough to read the interview, I'm not sure I'd care enough to read an entire book on the subject though.

  • A better review (Score:4)

    by thegrommit ( 13025 ) on Wednesday February 28, 2001 @06:44AM (#395280)
    can be found here [joystick101.org]

  • Re:Conquer, smonquer (Score:5)

    by supabeast! ( 84658 ) on Wednesday February 28, 2001 @07:16AM (#395281)
    "Even though the saturn and N64 had better hardware."

    Ummmmm... no.

    The Sega Saturn hardware was grossly inferior to the Playstation. The Saturn was designed only to support quadrilateral polygons, which are absolutely terrible (And extremely unpopular.) for video game use. Beyond that, it had a dual CPU architecture that only allowed one CPU to access memory at a time, which made programming for the machine a huge pain in the ass.

    As for the N64, the hardware really only looked great on paper. In practice it processes far fewer polygons than the Playstation, making 3D games a pain. It also has far too little memory (Later fixed with an add-on card.) which made it very, very hard to make textures look decent on the system.

    "True the N64 crippled itself by being a cartrige based system.."

    That only crippled the N64 in regards to full motion video, which does little to actually enhance a game. Plenty of games went over quite well on the Playstation without video clips.

  • Tomes of Videogame History (Score:5)

    by jvmatthe ( 116058 ) on Wednesday February 28, 2001 @06:30AM (#395282) Homepage
    David Sheff's Game Over gives a reasonable history of Nintendo during their rise to power. It discusses how they stepped over the dead body of Atari to take over as the video game king in the mid-80s to early 90s, despite the horrible video game crash of '83-'84. And for you anti-trust fanatics out there, it also talks about some of the shady practices that Nintendo might have adopted to get things going and keep them going. There is even an updated version, which I have not had time to read. This book is available on Amazon, but I actually found it at my local library back when I read it.

    Also, Leonard Herman has some reportedly great books, Phoenix: The Rise & Fall of Videogames and ABC To The VCS (A Directory of Software to the Atari 2600) about what people think of as the classic age of video games and the Atari 2600 specifically. Sadly, I have neither bought nor read these, but I hope to someday when the 25-hour day and 8-day week are implemented. You can find Herman's site here [rolentapress.com].

  • Someone had to do this sooner or later... (Score:5)

    by davejhiggins ( 188370 ) on Wednesday February 28, 2001 @06:45AM (#395283) Homepage
    I promise I'll make no more Zero Wing references after this one [ox.ac.uk]

    For the permamently afraid, it's not a goatsex / anything else revolting link, just a bit of a laugh :)

    Dave

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