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The Making of 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.
"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
The sole purpose of the Internet is to get porn and bomb making plans into the hands of children.
I avoid making this type of comment, but DAMN... That was FUNNY, man!
Nah, I thought it was pretty standard.
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?
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Ok...Ok...go around that corner...look! There's a book! Blast it! That blowed up real good!
Stupid sexy Flanders.
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!?)
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ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
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)
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ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
That is pure comedy gold, although maybe the name should have been changed from 'Cats' to 'Katz'
Oh, and for all you 'All Your Base' maniacs, get the new issue of Time. They have a mini-article on page 4 about it.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
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.
With great power comes great electricity bills.
The time article is here
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...
"Chill, Orrin!"---Trent Lott
CNN did an piece 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.
can be found here
"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.
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.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
For the permamently afraid, it's not a goatsex / anything else revolting link, just a bit of a laugh :)
Dave