The Making of PlayStation

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.

Comments

For a quick overview...

[Eoli]

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.

A better review

[thegrommit]

can be found here

Re:Conquer, smonquer

[supabeast!]

"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

[jvmatthe]

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.

Someone had to do this sooner or later...

[davejhiggins]

I promise I'll make no more Zero Wing references after this one

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

Dave