Gamingplaystationsonynintendoken-kutaragigaming-historysuper-famicom
Ken Kutaragi Says Losing Nintendo's CD Deal Felt Like Freedom, and He Never Built the PlayStation for Revenge
The father of the PlayStation told GamesIndustry.biz that Nintendo's switch to Philips went from a 'bad shock' to 'we are free to do anything' — and that today's multi-year, thousand-person games are 'meaningless.'
The interview happened in Middlesbrough, in the north of England, after Kutaragi’s keynote at the Game Republic New Horizons event on October 15. He’s 76 now, runs Cyber AI Entertainment and Ascent Robotics, and is dean of the Faculty of Information Science at the University of Kindai. He says he doesn’t have time to play games anymore.
The version of PlayStation history most people know goes like this: Sony built a CD drive for the Super Famicom, Nintendo humiliated Sony by switching to Philips, and Sony built its own console to get even. Kutaragi did build that add-on. “I did the prototype for Nintendo as a subsystem,” he says, and he “had never thought about it being the starting point for the current PlayStation franchise.”
His account of the breakup is the part worth reading twice. “The story says I was super shocked and decided to take revenge, but I never thought about that,” he says. “I didn’t think that we had to crush [Nintendo].” What the split actually did was take away the constraint of building a piece of someone else’s machine. The shock “changed to being a good shock.”
Sony’s CEO at the time, Norio Ohga, was the only person at the company who backed him, Kutaragi says. “He loved my challenging spirit.” The PlayStation launched in Japan in 1994.
The rest of the interview is about now, and he isn’t gentle. Platforms were once affordable and are now “super expensive,” with PCs costing the “price of a car.” He visited this year’s Tokyo Game Show and came away unimpressed: “The graphics were a little bit improved, but every other thing was the same.” On how big games get made, he’s blunt: “Taking several years with several thousand people… is meaningless. It’s almost impossible.”
I’ve heard the revenge version of this story for thirty years, and I’ve repeated it. It’s satisfying because it has a villain. Kutaragi’s version is more useful: a deal fell through, and the person closest to it noticed that he was no longer building a piece of someone else’s machine. That feeling of “we are free to do anything” is available to a lot more people than corporate revenge is. Most of us have had a project canceled out from under us. The question is whether you spend the next month angry or start sketching the thing you couldn’t build before.