The PlayStation: Defying the Odds

A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.


The logic Peter Molyneux keeps using to convince people to
give him money for his bullshit video game ideas

So much news and so few minutes in which to mention most of it. The Tokyo Game Show is in full swing, but I’ve been too busy working and getting my Zelda on to be able to do much in the way of commenting on any of it. As I’ve joked before, topicality is not always Active Time Event’s forte, and when it’s a one man show with no budget, it’s really the thought that counts. At least, that’s what I tell myself when crying myself to sleep at night for failing to deliver.


Pictured: My coping skills on display

Moving briskly on to our focus of the day, I spend some of the few precious free minutes I have right now in sharing this interesting tidbit from one of Sony’s former superstars, Ken Kutaragi, who use to be the SIE president during the height of Sony’s reign before stepping down in 2007, and is credited as one of the major architects (even referred to as “the father”) of the original PlayStation, who would go on to work on the PS2 and PS3 as well. The interesting tidbit in question is from a part of a presentation Kutaragi gave at TGS this week, involving how many within the industry that Sony consulted with thought the system was doomed to fail before launch:

“We wanted to share our passion…and we wanted to hear what their expectations were and what they did not expect, so we wanted to hear from them. So we visited dozens of companies, if not hundreds, we visited a lot of game makers, it was a great memory … they were not interested at all. They just said, ‘Don’t do it. There were multiple companies and none of them were successful. You are going to fail.’ That’s what they told us.

Kutaragi shared much in his keynote address, but this seemed to stand out as one of the more enlightening shares, he went on to even comment on internal opinions on the possible PlayStation brands potential:

“Even within Sony, nobody believed that we would be successful.”

Just goes to show you that even ideas that seem in hindsight to be wild successes will have their detractors from the get go. To think, all of this started because of a failed attempt by Nintendo and Sony to create a shared piece of hardware together for the home video game market that ended up falling through. Just look where we are now.

~Pashford