The Making of the PlayStation

Edge Online has an in-depth look at the beginnings of the first PlayStation console. It starts at Sony's partnership with Nintendo, the purpose of which was to integrate a CD-ROM drive into the SNES. A falling out between the companies led Sony to stubbornly pursue a market dominated by Nintendo and Sega. The console's technology and Sony's unusual position in the industry quickly attracted the interest of many developers and publishers, eventually leading to sales that emphatically won that round of the console wars. "'There was a huge resistance inside the company to actually being in the videogames business at all,' explains Harrison. 'The main reason why the Sony brand wasn't really used in the early marketing of PlayStation was not necessarily out of choice, but it was because Sony's old guard was scared that it was going to destroy this wonderful, venerable, 50-year old brand. They saw Nintendo and Sega as toys, so why on Earth would they join the toy business? That changed a bit after we delivered 90 per cent of the company's profit for a few years.'"

Comments

And as with all their products...

[Mnemennth]

... Sony had taken a brilliant innovation and nearly destroyed it by insisting on some form of proprietary hardware or another. Be it battery packs on their cameras or proprietary memory cards on almost everything they've ever made, they STILL don't understand how trying to OWN the standard almost guarantees you will NOT be compliant with whatever standard eventually develops, and therefore drives many potential customers to look elsewhere for products they would love to buy from Sony...

mnem

Where's the BetaMax?

Re:And as with all their products...

[Anonymous Coward]

What about bluray? They seem to have won this round. They've gone into a partnership to support it, I suppose, but that suggests that they learnt something from past experience...

~jabithew (AC because I moderated this thread).

Re:And as with all their products...

[feepness]

The PS3 runs Linux. Granted you cannot access 3D graphics but still it is the only major console to do so natively. Ever.

The PS3 can use any bluetooth/usb keyboard/mouse.

The PS3 can use any bluetooth headset.

The PS3 can be upgraded with any laptop hardrive.

This whole Sony forces you to use their technology meme has to die. They do so no more and often less than other manufacturers of their size.

Hell, HD-DVD was an entire attempt by MSFT to force a doomed from the start tech down the market's throat. Most egregious I've seen in ages.

The "Mass" Effect (no pun intended...)

[derGoldstein]

"One of the crucial points in the campaign to win hearts and minds came when Sony offered a solution to the problem that Japanese game publishers had no production capacity or supply infrastructure themselves. After all, under the Nintendo model, Nintendo would make and distribute their software for them ... One of the crucial points in the campaign to win hearts and minds came when Sony offered a solution to the problem that Japanese game publishers had no production capacity or supply infrastructure themselves. After all, under the Nintendo model, Nintendo would make and distribute their software for them"

This was the real force behind the success. It brought a massive amount of Japanese-culture into game design. Game developers didn't have to make everything "culture agnostic" if they didn't want to, and this was a big turning point.

Re:The "Mass" Effect (no pun intended...)

[SuiteSisterMary]

You're kind of correct,but have the wrong conclusions.

Nintendo had draconian policies about publishing. They arbitrarily limited the amount of games a company could publish per year. They required the publisher to order all cartridges through Nintendo, with a substatntial lead time. Per-cart prices were high. If you ordered too few, and the game did very well, it could be months before you had more stock on the shelves. If you ordered too many, and the game didn't do so well, you had a stack of expensive carts lying around.

Sony threw the doors open to developers; buy a dev kit and go to town. Publish a game a week if you want. Also, they didn't require CD manufacturing to go through them; any old CD pressing plant could do it. If you had a hit on your hands, you could, in theory, have another several hundred thousand copies pressed over a weekend for pennies per.

Let alone the fact that carts were so space limited compared to CDs.

If you can find Game Over: Press Start To Continue (the story of Nintendo from Hanafuda card manufacturer to the N64, basically) and Revolutionaries at Sony (the story of the Playstation) it's interesting to read the two sides.

Re:Sony has lost its way

[AuMatar]

You forgot to add that Sony has now lost more on the PS3 than it made on the PS2 and PS1 combined, and still loses money on each console sold. All for third place.

The real problem was Blu-Ray

[derGoldstein]

If you look at the manufacturing costs, the real problem was the Blu-Ray drives. They were so desperate to win that format war (and that was truly a phyrric victory), that they upped the PS3's manufacturing costs through the stratosphere. DVD would have been more than enough, and the Cell's price has gone down, as all architectures eventually do. The reason the price is still this high is that the combination of the Cell *and* BR drives is simply too much.

Imagine having access to PSN with a sub-$200 console. They would dominate by this point, if they just had their priorities straight.

Re:Sony has lost its way

[thetoadwarrior]

It wasn't just for 3rd place. It was to get Blu-Ray into as many homes as possible and win the format war which they did and, as far as 3rd place positions go, they're not doing that bad compared to MS who even had a year lead.

Had they launched at the same time I would put money on Sony beating the 360 even if each system had the same games libraries.

A lot of this is due to the fact no one outside of the US really likes the 360. Sony is beating them in Japan and MS has only about a million units lead over Sony. So it wouldn't take much to make MS lose their position.

It will be interesting if they'll rush out and try to be on first on the market knowing they don't have what it takes to beat Nintendo, they can't really afford another red-ring scenario and Sony knows they have to play smarter the next time around.

Re:Sony has lost its way

[TheRaven64]

At least one laptop manufacturer is including a chip with 4 Cell SPUs and IBM is selling Cell blades, so some people are using them. Unfortunately, because they aimed for the graphics market they only included single-precision floating point which meant that a lot of their potential market in high-performance computing ignored the chip (they all believe they need double-precision floating point, even the ones that are mainly running integer-only FORTRAN code).

There is still a lot of potential for the Cell. Toshiba, for example, are considering using it in HDTVs to decode all of the available MPEG-2 digital TV channels in parallel so there is no delay switching channels on digital DV and you can see channel previews easily. A lot of the early failures of the Cell were due to poor compiler support, but now LLVM has a Cell SPU back end this may change - it matches up very closely, for example, with OpenCL. Now that modern GPUs are adopting very similar designs to the Cell (i.e no fixed-function pipeline, just lots of SIMD units), it may start to be competitive in other areas.

The Cell hasn't exactly taken the world by storm, but it's probably premature to claim it's dead.