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In many American homes, there is a reasonable chance
that the video game Nintendo is hooked up to the television set you're watching.
There were more Nintendos bought for children last Christmas
than any other gift.
Die, please die. Please die.
And one in every three Japanese homes has Nintendo as well.
In some ways, Nintendo's history is modern Japanese history.
For most of its 99-year history,
Nintendo made board games and playing cards.
Traditional products for a traditional way of life.
In Japan and America, tradition has given way to craze.
Game preparation exercise! One! Two!
Three! Four! Five!
Six! Wow!
Nintendo was very smart about it.
They dipped their toe in the market in 1984, in New York,
just 10% of the country,
and established that there was a market for quality gaming.
They started with a very high-end little robot,
and they sold 100,000 in New York in the first year.
Up. Down.
Right. Left.
And Nintendo, I think, were the first company to appreciate
that they need to treat their consumers as if they're selling them a toy,
that needs to bring people pleasure and joy.
They worked very hard with the retailers
to get the products stocked and distributed in breadth and depth.
And the second thing is, they put a huge amount of money behind Mario.
Super Mario Brothers.
It was a Nintendo-dominated business.
And I was working at Sega at the time,
and our market share with the Master System was 4%.
Nintendo had 94%
and there was some Atari system lingering on that had 2%.
And 4%, that's crazy.
That's Mom going to the store
and buying a Master System rather than an NES
because she just doesn't know that there are two types of systems out there.
Sega really took time to self-reflect,
and they wanted to understand how they could better tackle the market.
They looked at where they succeeded, where they failed,
and they kind of reinvented themselves a little bit.
The reason, I think,
Sega had any kind of chance at all against Nintendo
was because they had amazing software development divisions.
But their focus was arcade.
I think Sega probably thought that with the skills they have,
there was another market they could take their games to.
We were going to try to leave Nintendo with the younger kids
and position ourself as the teen and college-age machine.
The Nintendo system's brain is an 8-bit computer chip,
a technology rapidly becoming outmoded.
Nintendo has a more powerful 16-bit system already hot in Japan,
but it won't arrive in the States till late next year.
The 16-bit Genesis system by Sega. Genesis does it all.
"Sega does what Nintendon't."
And so that was the famous phrase that we had,
and we would show different visuals
of something that we could do with Sega Genesis
that Nintendo didn't do with their 8-bit system.
And so, we were very much going after Nintendo right from the beginning.
Sega's Genesis is Nintendo's nemesis.
It's one of two 16-bit systems that are already in the US.
Sega clearly hopes to leapfrog Nintendo
by touting 16-bit's advantages.
There was an element in all their marketing, all their promotion,
their TV ads, their print ads,
where they went for style over substance,
and it almost made Nintendo look a little bit dated.
Sega!
Sega's marketing campaign absolutely resonated with me,
because being somebody who was fairly tech-oriented
and interested in the advancement of graphics, I wanted the best.
I wanted experiences that were going to surprise me, were going to take me
beyond what I had been playing for the last four or five years.
So they promised that you could get the arcade experience,
not in the arcade, but in your home, through the Sega machines.
So when the market moved from 8-bit to 16-bit,
with the introduction of the Mega Drive/Genesis,
Super Nintendo/Super Famicom devices in the late '80s,
then we had a market that was really taking off.
The graphics were becoming more realistic,
the games were becoming deeper and more sophisticated,
and you had two companies that were well financed,
that were taking each other on in the marketplace.
So, when you have two fighting head-to-head, the whole market grows.
And suddenly, games became a big mass market entertainment proposition.
Although the games themselves were still relatively simple
and appealed to a relatively narrow demographic,
everybody knew what Sega and Nintendo was about.
At Sega, we knew at some point
that cartridges with a limited amount of memory,
or very expensive memory,
was going to have to give way to optical media,
where you had much larger memory.
Interesting.
The encoded information on this disc
is read by a laser beam.
Hmm.
The problem was that cartridges as a format
went up in increments of about eight meg,
and there's only so much visual data you can get on those
without the cartridge getting more and more expensive for the consumer.
So, consequently, people felt
that if you're going to improve the graphics or add the movies
that they felt everyone wanted,
you had to do it via streaming from a CD.
So, Sega came in with this bolt-on called the Mega-CD.
and it basically allowed you to play CD games
with your Mega Drive controller
and using the processing power of the Mega Drive.
We were convinced that the audience was going to want to enjoy
music, animation, full-motion video,
and now we had to develop games.
Sony had approached us.
They had a studio down in Santa Monica.
They wanted to work with us,
and they understood that the future was going to be
with some kind of optical disc medium.
Sony had ventured into distribution of game software
to line up with its distribution of
movie software and music software.
That was called Sony Electronic Publishing.
It was set up under Sony of North America,
who reported at the time to Mickey Schulhof
and the management of that, Sony Electronic Publishing,
was assigned to Olaf Olafsson.
They not only built a distribution network,
but they also built some in-house game development capability.
Sony Imagesoft made mostly horrific,
but sometimes really good, but mostly terrible games
for other platforms based on Sony properties.
More often than not, Sony Pictures.
So, we did, like, Dracula Sega CD, which was horrible,
and Last Action Hero, and, like, Cliffhanger.
And if you want to see one of the ugliest games of all time,
look at Cliffhanger for Game Boy.
It is just abysmally horrific to look at and play.
Every now and then we would pump out an amazing game
or publish an amazing game, like...
I thought Hook was great, from the movie.
We did a game called Skyblazer, Equinox, Solstice.
But more often than not, they were terrible.
And so, we formed an alliance where we would each fund six games,
and they would fund three and we would fund three.
Or it might've been eight, and we funded four and they funded four.
But it was something like that.
And so, that was the deal we struck with Sony.
Don't you love the smell of the sewers in the morning?
They smell like victory!
The trouble is that the games that came with it
were largely just FMV exercises,
so you ended up with Kriss Kross: Mix Your Own Video,
which was where you used the controller to edit together Kriss Kross videos.
And there was Night Trap,
where you flicked between a number of security cameras
to save girls from these bizarre kidnappers.
But the quality of the movies was so grainy,
it immediately took you out.
So, on the one hand, you've got the relatively pristine graphics
of something like Road Rash,
but in order to get to Road Rash,
you then have to go to some dreadful movie, which is,
you know, smeary and blurred, and looks like an eighth-generation VHS.
Ken Kutaragi had had an incredible career
inside of Sony up to this point.
He was very interested in sound processing and signal processing,
and inventing new sound formats
that were powerful and possible with new silicon technologies.
And that led to the collaboration with Nintendo,
where Sony made the sound chip
that went into the Super Famicom and the Super Nintendo.
Through the partnership
on the sound chip for the Super Nintendo,
Sony and Nintendo entered into a contract to develop some new technology.
The first was going to be a disc drive that Nintendo would sell,
which would be an add-on to the Super Famicom/Super Nintendo device.
And Sony would sell a combined console and drive, all in the same machine,
that was called the Sony PlayStation.
So he was getting more and more into console design,
and Ken could see that
putting console games on CDs was the way forward.
When they came to write up the actual joint venture,
Sony said, "Well, we'll make the disc
"and we'll charge the $8 royalty and collect it,
"and, you know, we'll figure out how to split that.
"And you can make the cartridges
"and you can charge the publisher the $8 royalty,
"and then we can talk about how we share the profits on that."
And Nintendo said, "Wait a minute. Stop the music.
"We make the tollbooths.
"You can make the discs, but you're not making a tollbooth.
"We make the tollbooths.
"We'll sell the discs, just like we sell the cartridges.
"We'll charge the $8, whether they buy a disc or a cartridge."
Sony and Nintendo were uneasy bedfellows,
and I think that Nintendo's view
of what Sony's position was in developing this thing for them
differed from what Sony probably hoped was going to be a foot in the door.
Sony and Nintendo were working together
to come up with the new hardware,
but I think Sony was a little too greedy,
and tried to take over almost everything.
I think Nintendo realized they were giving too much power to Sony
in the manufacturing of the discs for the platform.
Sony had the right to license other developers and publishers
to create games for the platform,
and that was the real heart of the business model
between Sony and Nintendo.
I negotiated with Mr. Idei, the president of Sony,
and told him, "Let's go different ways."
And in a surprise announcement at CES,
there was an announcement that Nintendo would be
joint-venturing with Philips
on the disc part of the device.
It was very embarrassing to Sony
to have a relationship that they thought was going to be with Nintendo
and they were kicked out and replaced by Philips,
and that was the fuel that fired the creation of the PlayStation business,
and ultimately, possibly looked back on in history
as one of the biggest mistakes Nintendo ever made,
'cause they made a monster of a competitor.
I was still quite new, perhaps not even a month had passed since my hiring
when the atmosphere felt very different than usual as I arrived at work one day.
I thought that something must have happened that would change everything
bring about the end of an era.
I asked what had happened, and was told that we had been informed that
Nintendo had decided to go it alone
Even when the joint project
with Nintendo was cancelled
Kutaragi-san said that we at Sony
should make the system ourselves.
Something that Kutaragi-san said then
something that influences me even now
is that we may not have the greatest chance at success
but it's not like failing here would cost us our lives or anything
so we should just go for it.
And so, when Ken put together his plan for a new standalone console
that would be, eventually, the PlayStation,
and he took that to the then-president of Sony, Norio Ohga,
and said, "Could I have your support to make this happen?"
Ohga -san, who had obviously been deeply embarrassed
by the relationship breakdown with Nintendo,
said, "Yes, you have whatever you need."
This was still a secret project.
It was a skunkworks, if you will.
It was called Computer Entertainment Project Number One.
But that was 30 or 40 people in a building on Aoyama Dori in Tokyo
that were starting to plan
what would become both the company and the product.
The New Generation.
New generation system, new generation games,
and a new generation of value.
They're all part of the Sega generation for the '90s.
The Sega generation begins with the 16-bit technology of Genesis.
When we were looking for the next generation after Genesis,
it was quite an interesting and difficult challenge.
In terms of the Saturn...
The head of development at Sega of America was a guy named Joe Miller,
and he was very concerned about the chipset
that Sega Japan was going to use for the Saturn.
He was concerned that it wasn't quite good enough,
in terms of an advancement over 16-bit.
So, that was one part of the Saturn development.
Another part of the Saturn development
was introducing what was going on with Saturn to Sony.
Sony, now, was our very strong partner in developing third-party titles,
particularly, obviously, those CD-ROM titles.
And so, they wanted to be involved in
the development of the next hardware system.
Well, this made sense to me.
Olaf Olafsson was exec VP at Sony
and Mickey Schulhof was president of Sony America,
and there were some technical guys.
And we all thought this was a pretty good idea,
to have a combined hardware system, Sony/Sega or Sega/Sony,
because we all knew we didn't make money on hardware.
Why not do a combined system and make your money on software?
Well, I thought this was brilliant,
because we were certainly better at developing software
than Sony was in those days,
whether you're talking about Sega of America
or Sega Japan or Sega Europe.
And so, this meant that if we could have a hardware system
where we split the loss on the hardware
and each made profit off of our own software,
brilliant for Sega.
This had to be a win-win.
And so, I wanted very much to do this,
and interestingly, so did Sony of America.
When we explained it to Nakayama-san,
he thought it was a terrible idea.
He did not want to do it.
He said, "Sony doesn't know anything about the video game business.
"Why should we help them? Let's not do this."
So, I was very disappointed, and I wasn't happy about Saturn as it was.
So, 3DO was really the device
that announced that they were, in a big way,
going to start making CD-ROM-based video game machines.
There was another system called the TurboDuo,
but it came out in Japan, and it had a CD-ROM player.
Now, it was the first time on a video game I heard an actual audio score,
like an orchestra or like a band, right?
It was real music, not...
You know, not chip music,
but it was real recorded music being played back.
And the fidelity of the graphics was a little better.
So, the announcement of the 3DO meant the power was there,
and the capacity to store on a disc
was suddenly 600 megabytes, not 512K.
The 3DO was a stepping stone.
I mean, it didn't quite have enough power to create 3D games
but it was being billed as such.
It was, I have to say, a very difficult hardware to work with.
It wasn't based on triangles. It was based on twisted squares.
I've never seen anything like that before or since.
And the sales were just miserable as well.
Only sold, if I remember, about one million units.
Most of which had to do with the $700 price point for the console.
I mean, if you put that in today's dollars, with inflation,
that's got to be close to $1,500.
The pitching was very... You know, it was going to be the next big thing.
It really wasn't, and it was limited.
I think most of those, either the CD-i or the Marty or the 3DO,
were just a little bit ahead of reality.
All you had to do was have a basic understanding of computing
to know that it would all be about capacity of memory,
of how much you could fit on a disc,
and then the capacity and performance of chips
to know how well you could make things look or move
with that ability of the chips.
But I had lost faith in 3DO,
because, really, it was an underpowered system.
And at that time... So, this is in '92, '93...
I started to hear rumblings that Sony was considering building their machine.
And that was a real consumer electronics player, right?
Like, not just a video game company, not a small Coleco,
not a dedicated game company, like Sega or Nintendo,
but a big media and consumer electronics powerhouse
was getting into the industry.
PlayStation came from the word "work station"
a computer with a large screen
and multiple programs installed
so the user can do a variety of work.
These aren't specialist devices.
Similarly, the PlayStation would
be able to play a variety of games.
We wanted to do not just games
but also work with music and communications.
the name of the device became PlayStation. Given these requests
So, the original specification for the PlayStation
was taking some real-time 3D chipset technology
that had been developed in something called System G.
And System G was a real-time 3D toolset for broadcast television,
for the kind of rotating, spinning graphics
that you would see on sports programs or news programs.
Live television, basically.
And that was a couple of engineers
who were really quite advanced in thinking about real-time 3D,
and what that could mean in the home got Ken very excited.
And then, marrying that
with Sony's obvious prowess in CD and CD-ROM technology.
And they also had an in-house experience
with building computers based on MIPS processors,
so they were able to draw on two or three different technologies.
Obviously, sound was a strong part of Sony's background.
And they brought all of those technologies together
into the one device.
The guts of the machine was fairly off-the-shelf parts,
in terms of using a RISC chip, 3000A,
and other components.
But the secret sauce was some of the bespoke elements that we added.
So we had a special sound chip,
and with the graphics chip, the GPU, we had special hardware to handle things
like geometry transforms. There was GTE.
And also, some bespoke math as well. Some special caches.
And on the CPU as well, we had extra hardware support
for actually rendering movies in real-time.
So streaming those off the disc as well.
And the idea that you could have a MIPS processor
in a home console...
Never mind in a workstation. In a home console.
And on top of that, have 3D graphics functionality and amazing audio...
It was nuts.
This was Sony's and PlayStation's first entrance into the market.
And, of course, you had Sega and Nintendo, who were fantastic,
knew what they were doing as well.
And I think... If you are going to enter a new market,
you have to do things differently.
We knew we needed the best creators on the platform
to make the best games possible.
There was a need to pursue
a positive, a proactive relationship with third parties,
which in the world of Nintendo and Sega
was seen as really a thorn in their side.
You know, like mosquitoes,
that really just got in the way of shelf space
that they could've had for their super rock star developers,
their in-house people.
So, it was clear that
without some anchor, tentpole titles from our first-party studios,
we had to rely totally on other people's money, other people's support.
PlayStation seemed to have a hit list
of all the people they needed to get on board,
in order to have a great launch here.
They spoke to everybody, and they made sure
that there was no barrier to entry.
They went to Konami, they went to Namco, they went to Irem.
They went to all these companies and they said,
"Here's what we want to do. We want you involved."
And after people dealing with Nintendo, who could be quite tricksy,
this was a breath of fresh air.
The fact that Namco was dominating
the arcade scenes at the time
meant there was a huge, rich early portfolio
of tried and tested video game experiences,
which were incredibly important to Sony
in terms of working towards trying to adopt those onto the PlayStation.
I went along with them, meeting all these developers and other employees
and my role there was to take notes for everyone.
That was before everything.
When the PlayStation had just got its start as a business
these meetings were very important for Sony.
I think that my name is probably on each set of notes there.
That was another one of my jobs then.
And they talked about the technology that they would want,
they would talk about the business model that they want.
And we quite quickly evolved this mantra
that if we as a platform can be the creative choice of the developers
and the commercial choice of the publishers,
then we have a chance of success.
And we got feedback from a number of the companies saying,
"If you get to a million units,
"then we will support you."
And I think that was set as a target
that was impossible in their mind for Sony to achieve.
And so, we promised that we would do a million units in Japan.
And then we had some other conversations that were much more mundane,
but, actually, possibly even more impactful.
In the graphics chip of the PlayStation One
is a unique graphics mode.
And the only reason that graphics mode is there
is to allow Capcom to more easily port their arcade games to the PlayStation.
Sega and Nintendo had a decade or more
to develop an in-house development capability.
Sony had very little.
Just a little bit from Electronic Publishing,
some from Psygnosis, and one or two in Japan.
The rationale behind the acquisition of Psygnosis
was that Sony Imagesoft in the US
was looking for more and more development talent
for its games.
Psygnosis had developed some really clever technology
to do with streaming of data and video from CD-ROMs,
initially working on devices like the FM Towns in Japan,
but then also on Sega CD,
which Sony was a big supporter of,
because it used our CD manufacturing capabilities.
And so, Psygnosis was eventually acquired by the US division of Sony
in the early part of 1993,
and then they were one of the early developers
who were helping to create games
at the beginning of PlayStation.
And Sony, actually, at the time, didn't do acquisitions.
I think we were about their eighth acquisition lifetime.
We were sold to by Olaf Olafsson and Mickey Schulhof,
who clearly had a passion to innovate.
We didn't know why they had this passion to innovate at the time.
Anyway, the transaction completed.
A couple of weeks later, we're on a plane to Tokyo,
and we're introduced to this...
I can only describe it as a busted photocopier.
A huge cabinet with chips and wires hanging out of it,
bit of a controller, and the famous dinosaur's head.
So, we looked at this strange piece of hardware,
and, of course, it lit up for me.
We just couldn't wait to get our hands on this thing.
And it became very clear early on that it was slightly ill-conceived
for mass-market development and deployment
into the development community.
And also the hardware itself was a bit odd in some ways,
because it had really been designed as using the CD like a pseudo cartridge.
So, you put the CD in, you load the game,
you take the CD out.
That wasn't where we thought that piece of hardware should go.
So, we recommended up-spec'ing the CD.
More memory.
Which was well-received by the engineers in Japan, I have to say.
Ken Kutaragi, in particular.
So the PlayStation started to take shape.
Ian would always come in and say excited things, like, you know,
he's seen amazing technology at some meeting
or some conference or whatever.
But I remember everyone getting very excited about
the delivery of this new item.
And it was huge,
and it was covered in fans, just strapped to it.
And it made a hell of a noise when you fired it up.
And it was the very first dev kit of the PlayStation.
So, they did their homework.
It wasn't just that they knew what kind of machine needed to be built.
It wasn't just that they knew what kind of services they needed to provide.
They knew which partners they needed to target.
And that's the hardest thing of all. And they nailed it.
Our approach was to be as open as we could
to be hands-on, to go and visit them,
to create developer conferences,
and really act in a way that maybe hadn't been seen before,
in terms of actually helping developers understand
what we wanted to do, and helping them to get there as well.
I was inspired by what I had experienced at the 3DO developers' conference
in San Francisco, or near San Francisco, in late 1992.
And what I saw was, for the first time,
they were treating the creators like rock stars.
And they realized that the creative community
was more important than talking to the execs of the publishers.
And we took the same model, we expanded upon it,
and we focused a lot of our efforts on making great developer tools,
and making the developer experience the best that it could be,
because we know that creative people have a choice.
They can choose what platforms to work on,
and they can choose which platforms to put their best people on.
And we knew that if we could make working on PlayStation a great experience,
we would get the best people, and the best people make the best games.
Sony was going around talking to the Capcoms and the Konamis of the world.
I believe we were lumped into that group of meetings,
and in that, someone came to the Sony Music offices,
where we were working at Sony Imagesoft,
from Sony and said, "Here's this VHS tape.
"This is what PlayStation is
"and this is what Sony's going to be making,
"and you guys are now going to be putting all your stuff on PlayStation."
And that tape was wild.
Jurassic Park was huge at the time.
Everybody talked about the dinosaur,
and when you actually saw it in real-time in 3D,
for the time, you were like, "Holy cow, this is amazing."
Sony gave us this demonstration of a dinosaur. It was a T-rex head.
And they told us how it would move around in real-time CG.
Of course, we were making games at the time, but we were also film fans,
and the CG in Jurassic Park had made a huge impact.
To see the same kind of visual depictions from Jurassic Park,
actually moving around in Sony's Tyrannosaurus demo,
on this platform called PlayStation.
That left a very lasting impression on us.
As a viewer of the tape, we're envisioning
"It's going to be that dinosaur fighting a pterodactyl,
"and there's going to be beautiful waterfalls in lush jungles,"
and it's like, "Well, actually, everything the PlayStation can do
"is just to make that dinosaur against a black background.
"It can't do anything else.
"But we want to at least show you that we can do this cool dinosaur."
But then it went on to show you actual games,
either in development or proof of concepts.
And it showed Jumping Flash!
And that was the first time I'd ever actually thought
that you could break the bounds of that, really, at the point,
getting very tired, stale, 2D, side-scroll way of expressing a game,
and suddenly you have this massive verticality
and this robot rabbit is jumping
what seemed to be thousands of feet in the air.
And there was a JRPG and it looked like a hand-drawn cartoon.
And when they went into battle sequences,
it was like you were watching an anime sequence
of like, camera cuts and beautiful effects.
That was what got me excited enough to say,
"This industry's about to get super exciting,
"because it feels now like you can express games
"in a much more dynamic and exciting and cinematic way,"
that really, before I knew much about pure game design,
just at a surface level, it was like, "Wow, that is so crazy exciting,"
that this tape is basically saying to us,
"Hey, game creators, we are about to allow players
"to literally step into these worlds."
How many colours you could use
was always a question then.
Moving into an era
where you could use all these colours
as well as polygons and textures
really was like a dream to me.
If felt that if I could do all that
then I could make the 3D Metal Gear
that I had wanted to
since the days of the MSX but was unable to.
Though changing the colouring was a scary idea.
When I saw the PlayStation presentation
I saw that I would be able
to make the game that I really wanted
with a full set of colours and polygons.
That idea was really shocking to me.
I mean in a positive sense of the word.
When I heard that Sony,
a company known for audio and electronics equipment,
was making a game console,
I was both excited and anxious to see what they would come up with.
Then when I saw this machine
with its CD-ROM drive,
and the 3D polygon visuals,
it was a completely different approach to what had come before
and revolutionized the industry.
I think if Sony had not entered the console market at that time
then it would be totally different today.
When I saw what they came up with,
with the CD-ROMs and the polygons,
it felt like a brand new approach to games.
You just wanted everybody to say,
"I want to be part of this project because it is the future."
And I think 99%-plus people bought in on that basis.
You didn't have to sell it to them
and they didn't feel like they were taking a risk.
Three, two, one. Go!
Wow. What a start!
This is just what I wanted to see.
Working on the magazines,
we used to get things like Login and Famitsu,
and I remember the first time the Ridge Racer screenshots appeared.
And you knew then it was a game-changer.
You knew then that this was a proper 3D console.
This was something that...
It wasn't faking 3D,
like the FX chip on the Super Nintendo or Mode 7.
There was a camera that was panning around things.
The cars in Ridge Racer were going past you,
and it wasn't a 2D sprite.
And it was... It just blew you away. It was incredible.
Yes, I remember at the time,
being asked to demo a sample
to various development companies.
This was met with some shock and awe.
Reactions such as, 'wow, they can really do this...'
I was aware at the time that other companies
had studied the demo really closely.
I think that it was a massive success, as a sample.
We learned what we can do with hard work.
We needed to make better games, and so did Namco.
I think that this was a great development.
The initial SDK was certainly quite large
around this size, and it was heavy too.
Sony sent it to the game companies in March of 1993.
A number of game companies said
that they wouldn't be able
to make games for the PlayStation
if Sony didn't have the SDK out
by the final day of March.
And so it wound up
that the final day of March was our due date.
I remember us completing and delivering it.
The machines were hand-made
and we couldn't send them
via a home delivery service
due to their weight, size
and large power source.
This meant that we delivered them ourselves
taking taxis and bullet trains to do so.
3 or 4 of those were around 30 kg
but we brought them to the game companies.
There were actually some people
that flew all the way to the US with them.
It was quite clear that people were excited about it,
and there were a lot of loose lips as people started getting the hardware.
And Psygnosis, for example, were very vocal on what it could do.
And everyone just started talking about 3D.
You know, previously 3D had been pseudo 3D.
But all of a sudden, you know, you had people who were talking about
the possibilities that were afforded by this new hardware
where 3D was incredibly easy, comparatively, to what had gone before.
So, yeah, 3D was a huge, huge part of it.
And it wasn't like, you know,
when you used to get things like F-18 Interceptor and stuff like that,
and it would be a jerky plane made out of about 15 polygons.
No, you were talking about platform games that were made out of 3D items,
and it was just revolutionary, really strong.
It drew triangles for you.
Whereas prior to that, every other 3D game that had come out on any platform
that had tried to draw a triangle and fill it in with a texture
had had to do that in software.
So the CPU is sat there, going, "Right,
"there's a red dot there, a blue dot there, blah, blah, blah."
Suddenly with the PlayStation, you just go,
"Here's the three corners of my triangle, here's my texture, draw it."
Bang, and it's on screen, perfect for you, projected into 3D.
You know, it's like, wow, that's taken so much of the difficulty away
and allowing you to do something you've not been allowed to do before.
In our first work
to try and help developers succeed on PlayStation,
the main problem, I think, we were teams who were new to 3D,
and who'd already been working maybe on 2D titles for years,
but PlayStation was maybe the first leap into this new era.
And you needed a good grasp of math
to cope with vectors and matrices transformations.
Quaternions, and otherwise exciting things...
And if you didn't have the basic math to do that kind of stuff,
you couldn't code in 3D anymore.
So, it was quite a step change.
A lot of our peer group
just went away from the games industry,
at that transition from 2D to 3D.
Working with 3D changes everything.
Just to give an example,
in the 2D world, what you could see of the world was restricted.
It was just what was within the boundaries of the TV set.
With a 3D world, with perspective,
you can see everything that's in the distance.
And so, I remember going to a trade show,
and the poor team that was making a game
hadn't realized that this was a fundamental rule of 3D.
You had to restrict what was visible.
And so they had a long, long canyon that ran at a few frames a second,
because they were trying to display the whole thing.
And as you'd walk down the canyon,
the frame rate would get better and better and better
until it would be at interactive rates
when you were at the very end of it and couldn't see anything.
And this was just the basics.
We had to learn to make worlds with lots of crooked geometry in them,
so that these views to infinity didn't occur.
It's like suddenly being offered a whole new medium to create stuff in.
For many people that's actually completely unnerving.
And that's really how I remember that transition.
I remember actually being very excited about creating artificial worlds
in a different way than the pixel-bashing days of yore.
I think it ultimately comes down to the fact that we live in a 3D world,
so that's what we're used to.
There are things in the distance,
we go and explore, we look around.
It's what kids do. You run around, you explore,
you find hiding places,
play hide and seek... You make dens, you climb trees.
All those sorts of things.
And that was a chance for us to do that in games.
You know, you've got to remember that,
perhaps from a programmer's point of view,
going into the 3D world would've been a difficult transfer,
but for an artist, it was probably the opposite.
Because we always wanted to push what we could do.
We always wanted more,
we always wanted to display more,
we wanted to make things more visually elaborate.
We wanted a 3D environment.
So, in some respects, from the early days, right up until Tomb Raider,
there were more constraints if anything else.
Our world was opening up.
It got easier for us to develop.
Our ideas would...
We could put those concepts onto screen, and a lot easier,
the more that the software developed through the years.
There was the technical aspects of the 3D, which were brutal.
But even worse was how it works with the gameplay.
Because, essentially, if you think of what's going on
in a classic 2D character action game like Donkey Kong Country,
is you've got a character moving one or two-dimensionally,
like, on the screen,
and then they're doing timing-related things,
like jump, jump, jump, spin,
you know, kick, or whatever.
Jump, jump, leap on the thing, ride the thing over, jump.
And it's all about the constraint.
Because of the 2D-ness, it's very easy to make it so that your only choices
were to either, like, jump on that barrel or fall in the pit.
Or jump on the barrel
or ride on that moving platform, or fall in the pit.
In 3D, it turns out, because of the extra dimension,
there are several huge problems.
There's basically the fact that,
okay, you are in a field and there's a monster running towards you,
and nothing really prevents you from just running around it.
That can't really happen in 2D,
because that "around" is the dimension that's in and out of the screen
that you don't get in the 2D game.
But in the 3D game, you're looking at it the other way
and it's the left-right dimension,
but it's the extra dimension.
It doesn't matter which way it is.
It's just the extra dimension. It gives you too much degrees of freedom.
So you've got that problem, you've got the camera problem,
which makes judging the jumps and the timing
much, much more difficult depending on what the point of view is.
And the point of view is not so set.
On the 2D one, there's only one logical point of view,
which is perpendicular to...
In the third dimension that you're not actually using.
In the 3D game,
the camera is in the same three dimensions as the actual game.
And where is it? Is it behind the character, the side of the character,
is it changing, is it moving?
What happens if you start to curve and go sideways?
And there was no example of how to handle this.
And so we had to figure it all out.
Capcom had only very recently started using 3D graphics
so we began our work by first thinking
about how we could go about using them.
Our benchmark was that T-Rex demo that Sony came out with.
We took quite a number of approaches
from working as hard as we could to replicate what they had put out
to thinking that it would actually be a bad move
to approach Resident Evil like they did T-Rex.
We really were starting from zero there.
It just wouldn't display
so the idea of going full 3D
just wasn't going to get much traction.
With things going like this
it started feeling like it could get cancelled.
When Alone in the Dark came out
it had a large quantity
of pre-rendered graphics displayed.
The only object was the character itself.
From the player perspective
the game had a three-dimensional atmosphere
and all of this demonstrated
that it was now possible
to create a more complete game
including visually.
From there, we steadily moved onto animation methods.
By deciding to use camerawork to show a 3D space in 2D,
Mikami-san established the blueprint for what would become Resident Evil.
Essentially, the idea was
that there would be zombies
that were located in places
that the camera didn't reach.
The player couldn't see them
but they could hear them.
There was a certain scariness
in zombies being out of sight.
This type of fear was sort of
the main concept for the game.
I imagined the player
growing very jumpy about everything
and being on the edge of their seat.
Where they would be able to sense
that there was a zombie
just around the corner.
The camera marks...
Well, I did set the cameras,
but I didn't have any experience shooting with a real camera.
I started learning from step one,
imagining how a player going through a corridor would feel,
which camera angles would frighten them.
That's how I went about it.
If we get down to the technical details,
a single room could only have 8 cameras...
You really remember this well!
Due to reasons of memory capacity.
This doubled to 16 for Resident Evil 2.
There were just 8 for the first game.
You only had so many cuts
and you had to make the game playable,
without leaving any blind spots in the room where the character can't be seen.
First time I ever saw Resident Evil,
the guy from Virgin brought in a disc,
and he went, "Just have a look at this." He didn't say anything else.
And we were all watching it,
and you get that bit where the first zombie turns around
and you go, "Yeah, brilliant."
And then, all of a sudden, you're walking along a hallway
and the dog jumps through the window.
And two of my team left,
and then one of them came back
just as the spider fell from the ceiling,
and immediately turned and walked out again.
It was one of the most exciting games that I knew was coming out.
It was one that really, really blew me away.
This is RuptureFarms.
They say it's the biggest meat processing plant on Oddworld.
I wasn't really interested in games at all, in making them.
The idea never occurred to me.
And it still didn't occur to me until I was in the film business for a while,
and I was looking at how do I take my desire to create virtual worlds,
meaning fantasy worlds or worlds of the imagination,
and convert that using 3D computer graphics
into stories I want to tell, into characters that I'd like to develop,
and into money I'd like to make.
And that's what transitioned my brief history,
let's say seven years of computer animation traditionally,
into wanting to start a video game company.
Now, I hadn't seen a PlayStation yet,
but it gave me the faith to say,
"Okay, this stuff is getting real,
"and I understand Hollywood enough, I believe,
"to understand what I think is going to happen with video games."
And that really gave me the inertia to say,
"If we don't do it now, we're not going to be able to later."
And so, that was '90...
'92, I started convincing Sherry McKenna
we need to start a game company.
Lorne comes to my house in the Hollywood Hills,
and we're sitting by the pool because I'm...
Hollywood
And, Lorne says, "You know, I've got this just really great idea."
And I go, "Okay, tell me what it is," 'cause I love stories.
So he tells me this awesome idea.
I'm telling you, it was such a great idea.
And it was just like a reflection of what was going wrong with the world.
The Glukkons were scared, 'cause profits were grim.
And I went, "Oh, man, this is so awesome. We could make five movies!"
And he goes, "Yeah, no, we're going to do five games."
And I went, "Games? What are games?"
He goes, "You know, video games?" And I went, "No, I don't know."
And then I saw the PlayStation.
And I thought, "I don't know. Maybe we can do...
"Maybe we could do really good computer graphics for video games."
...when some Big Face appeared and said I was dead.
Said our land was changing,
was imbalanced at best.
He told me my fate was to rescue the rest.
When we actually started the production of the game,
we had two types of people.
We had people that had come with us from Hollywood,
and then we had people that were acquired through the game industry.
And with Sherry,
I would tell her the stories and we would talk about it,
and at a certain point, she had said,
"Well, it's really... In games today, aggression equals rewards.
"And what you're talking about, Lorne, is really empathy can equal rewards."
And I was like, "That's it! That's the mark.
"And I think if we can do that,
"then we can bring a wider audience to gaming
"and still have the challenging aspects that make gaming great.
"But we can bring a bit more of the epic storytelling to it.
"And a bit more of Hollywood production design,
"and Hollywood animation values."
I'm telling a story.
Oddworld's games are going to be about a story,
and the vehicle that we're going to use to tell that story
is going to be a video game.
And in those days, the only way to do it was with the cut scenes.
So, to tell the story, which is all I care about...
Touching people.
You can't do it in a side-scroller
where they're bombing and killing and...
No, it's about telling a story.
So, those cinematics, those cut scenes,
yeah, they had to be the same quality as when I came from that industry.
Hmm?
Well, I rescued Mudokons, but who's going to rescue me?
gameplay and cut scenes were separate.
Cut scenes were like movie scenes
with the characters and backgrounds
being entirely rendered separately.
I didn't want to do it like this.
I wanted to make cut scenes
that used the game models as they were
to use those models and the camera
to tell a story to the player.
That is what I wanted to do.
There was also the player being able
to control the camera as they played.
There could be rear or side view
3 cameras above that the player
could use to control the display
and give them a sense of control.
They could change things themselves
which made for richer gameplay
that was more film-like.
These are two ideas
that I had wanted to work on
when we made Metal Gear Solid.
It could be said that these have
turned into a sort of standard for us.
Even though some film-like techniques
or cuts had been used in games up until then
the lack of camera meant each frame
had to be created individually.
These images couldn't be manipulated.
That's how it was then.
Where 3D polygons are used
the player can also move the camera.
This was the first time that we were
able to work with cameras like this
rather than just set angles.
This made me extremely happy
as I love movies and knew
about these techniques and ideas
and we could now use these processes
to accomplish previously impossible things
Of course, in the beginning,
most people were used to playing 2D games.
The tempo of these games was very different.
With the shift to 3D,
what were 2D images, now had depth.
Consequently, the camera became pivotal
and it was down to the player to gauge distances.
It was very difficult for a player
to work out timings and when to brake
until they got used to it.
With earlier games,
it was easy for players to follow the extension of a straight line,
so we made adjustments with the 3D games to keep them interesting.
For example, when taking a corner,
centripetal force acting on the car
pulls it out around the curve,
so we wrote a program to intentionally
pull the car back in and control its movements.
This was pretty much everybody's first experience with 3D,
and so we were all trying to figure out what the rule set is.
How do you even make a game in 3D?
And everybody had a different approach.
With Naughty Dog and Crash, they had the approach that
they would keep the camera on rails,
and they would calculate beforehand
every polygon that needed to be displayed for every point in the path.
And as a result, they could have really amazing graphics
because there was no wastage.
If that polygon was needed, it was displayed.
If it was hidden behind something else, they could cut it out.
To some extent, what they were doing was,
they were leveraging the incredible size of a CD-ROM for this,
because only a CD-ROM could hold that much data.
When it came to deciding what kind of game
we ultimately wanted to make FINAL FANTASY VII into,
we felt that it needed a large volume
of high-end movie cut scenes.
Not the real-time 3D graphics in the game, but pre-rendered movies,
and CD rom media
would be needed for that.
We had decided what we most wanted to do with the game,
and concluded that
we would need to use CD rom to make that a reality.
Our tests and discussions led to that result.
And that resulted in FINAL FANTASY VII
coming out on the PlayStation.
Well, for us, CD did provide a lot of storage opportunities for developers.
Yeah, more than 650 megabytes,
which, compared to a cartridge at the time, is immense,
and, in fact, even compared to the hard disk on a PC, it was pretty vast.
Three, two, one.
Go!
The main thing, obviously, was the CD audio that you could play as well.
If you look at the games, especially like WipEout and so on,
they're known because of their audio soundtrack.
Until CDs came along, most music had been quite chip music-y,
and quite plinky-plonky kind of sounds,
and having a CD-ROM and WipEout
being able to play back a proper full soundtrack,
you know, that you might have in your car or on your headphones or whatever,
was something new.
For Twisted Metal, the Speed soundtrack was just...
Speed was this movie that was out at the time,
which was a wonderful movie,
and a great action soundtrack that still holds up.
And it just blew my mind that I could send that soundtrack
to the composer for Twisted Metal and say,
"Hey, can we have a climax level song that kind of evokes this?"
And suddenly, not only do we get something back
that feels inspired by Speed,
but it's pure symphonic quality sound
because it's streaming directly off the CD.
For the PlayStation, I think it was
exciting initially, just to realize you had 24 audio channels.
So, they would be used for sound effects mainly.
So you could play 24 sounds at once.
And it had built in reverb and delay processing as well
that you could apply to any of those voices.
So, that was great for things like, if you were doing a basketball game,
it actually sounded like you were in an arena,
rather than just silent background noise,
and that's what I think it really added, more depth to the sound.
Here we go.
The PlayStation was the first console
that could use pulse-code modulation.
That's where sound is recorded and a sample loop created
with that loop being played afterwards as the sound.
To record the car sounds in Gran Turismo, we'd rent each one
and then record the engine in phrases, starting with the idling sounds
We took these recordings and made sample loops for each engine
making a tone quality specific to each engine.
I remember now that when we played back
the cars sounds we had recorded
We started noticing things.
Like how the pitches would drop in pitch the farther away they were.
Or rise in pitch the closer they were...the blur effect.
Gran Turismo was probably the first game to put these in a game, certainly.
You could have something that sounded professional very quickly.
If you had some piece of music that really fitted the game,
you were not restricted to any limits
regarding fitting it into RAM or anything like that.
or constraints for memory or CPU.
You'd just say, "Play this track."
So, you'd have something...
You know, a full orchestral piece, if you wanted, in your game,
and you'd still have these other 24 channels of sound effects on top of it.
So that was really why that big leap
between things like the Mega Drive and the SNES,
is that you suddenly had things that
sounded as good as if you were just watching things on TV.
In the SNES era, the game screens were 2D,
and there were no voices of course,
and no cinematic movie scenes.
So you had to have music with strong melodies.
Tunes that would still stand up,
even if you listened to them repeated over and over.
I think our music composer,
Mr. Uematsu was also suitably aware of this when he composed the score.
Mr. Uematsu said this at the time.
When the CG animation became more 3D with the PlayStation,
and the cinematic movie scenes became more dramatic,
the visuals had a much greater impact.
And paradoxically, if you used the same melodies,
the same logic for making music as in the SNES era,
then the music and the visuals would jar, and clash with each other terribly.
This would stop the scene from coming together and lose its effectiveness.
So when we showed strong visuals, we would make the music more reserved,
or for moments where the characters' emotions were high,
we would ramp up the music.
I remember feeling how that balancing between
soft and hard had changed from the SNES era.
So in the field of music too,
the way games used music had become closer to film or video,
the way background music is added in films.
I think the way games were made probably changed to have an awareness of that.
It was clear that the potential was there, which was fabulous.
So, obviously, the big question was,
"How much will the PlayStation cost
"and will Sony be able to market it,
"and get a foothold in a market that's dominated by Nintendo and Sega?"
That was certainly a lot of the sentiment,
that, "Oh, Sony, really?"
But I think there were also some people internally that thought,
"Well, okay, maybe they can't, but they are a consumer electronics company.
"Maybe they have the insight that we don't know."
But over time, we heard they were making deals with Namco,
with some of these other really good IP companies.
We started learning a little bit about the toolsets that they're using
and how people are developing for it.
And that's when you started to really worry.
When Sony introduced the PlayStation,
there was a graveyard of consumer electronics companies
who had tried to enter the multimedia business
or the interactive entertainment business.
And so, a lot of those companies had got some nice technologies,
but not the best technologies.
But very few got
the combination of technology,
business model and creativity right.
Everybody learns from everybody else's failures.
So, I was very worried
about Sony bringing out a game system,
and I thought there was a very good likelihood
that they were going to be successful.
Obviously, Sega was a significant competitor and competitive threat
to PlayStation.
Introducing Sega Saturn.
Hit it.
Sega's next generation gaming platform.
There initially was a lot of excitement around it,
and we were running systems in there,
and we were able to see these incredible, almost call them prototypes,
being run on this system.
And we thought, "Wow. You know, if we do that,
"we will absolutely corner the market on this.
"We will be the console system."
And Sega clearly had an advantage
in their rich heritage and history of arcade games.
And so, they could port Virtua Fighter from the arcade
straight onto the Sega Saturn,
and that would be a great title for them to introduce the platform with.
But then we saw Tekken, and then we thought, "Oh, no."
Because, you know, again, being a consumer-facing company,
what are the consumers going to see?
They don't care that Virtua Fighter is a full 3D arcade port.
What they do is, they look at Tekken and they go, "Wow.
"Look at how that looks. It looks so realistic."
You know, "I can see the face, and it looks like a real person."
Of Namco's polygon games at that time,
our game became the model for many other companies.
I've heard that said often.
I don't think this was because the design was interesting.
Rather, it was the paradigm shift in polygon technology,
from a 2D to a 3D world.
It was this intense evolution of polygon technology
which brought about our success.
So, we thought, "Oh, no,
"we need to look at product a little deeper."
Also, I would say the biggest thing for us
and the most disappointing thing for us
was when Sega took that first step forward
and announced a really high price-point for the Sega Saturn.
And that kind of punched us in the gut a little bit,
and we thought, "Oh, no, they might be able to beat this price."
I'm going to talk to my parents about this one.
I like this one, a lot.
You better tell them it's $399.
I'll tell them. I'll try.
In Japan,
Nakayama-san and others felt that we had to really get Saturn out
well before the Sony machine was launched.
And so, that was why they pushed very hard
to introduce it earlier than it was ready to be introduced,
before we had enough hardware manufactured
and before we had enough software ready to play on it.
The decision was, "We've got to get out before Sony does
"so we better hurry things along."
Now you may return to the world as you know it.
And remember, look for Sega Saturn.
It's out there.
So, the run-up to the launch of PlayStation in Japan
was a fantastically exciting time,
because you had this new business, this new platform,
and all of the promise and excitement around that.
But still a certain amount of disbelief
or lack of credibility in the marketplace.
Shortly before the introduction of PlayStation in Japan in 1994,
to give confidence to the publishing and developer community in Japan,
we announced that we would be
the sole distributor and publisher of everybody's software,
so that they had a way of getting
to retail shops and getting into the market.
With CD-ROMs you can manufacture
a certain number in a week
so in order to ship large quantities
you needed to begin the process ahead of time
and build up your stored copies.
Game companies want to spend
as much time as they can on development
so they like to wait until the final week
before beginning production.
There could also be bugs in the game
so both Sony and the publishing company
need to test for that.
Sony has several dozen people do this.
But this was Sony's first game console
so they had no idea how to test for these things.
We created the system for this
hired the personnel
and carried it out
all in the final three months before release.
There were a lot of things that we had to do
during those final three months
that were new for us at Sony.
And we had a program to get to 100,000 units, day one.
That was a milestone that we wanted to get to in Japan,
so that that would be a real big number
that we could talk about in the games press
and talk about in the business press
to show that we were serious.
And to make 100,000 units of a PlayStation was no small undertaking.
The maximum number of units
for a Sony product
such as the Walkman
on the day of release
was 5,000 or 6,000 units.
If you wanted to put out 20,000 units
you would be told that it was too many
The idea was to begin production slowly.
Sony couldn't move slowly with a game console.
Companies were getting ready to release games.
Hardware has no value without its software
so if a company is aiming to publish
100,000 copies of a title
then at a minimum
you need 100,000 consoles ready.
Given this, we needed to produce the PlayStation
In mass quantity, right from the beginning.
This was completely different
than Sony's usual approach at the time.
Also, we needed to have the consoles
delivered to stores all on the same day
in order to stimulate game sales.
So, it was just this great symbiosis of clever people doing great things.
There were no boundaries and there was no,
"Well, you're doing the Japanese launch
"and we're doing this, and you make the games."
It was just this big, flat, enthusiastic, you know, committed team of people.
We had, I think, six or seven games available, day one.
Everyone remembers Ridge Racer, and rightly so,
as being the game that was probably the most exciting.
But then there was a whole host of local Japanese content that came out
that really made the PlayStation successful in Japan.
At one point, we had over 2,000 registered developers in Japan alone,
which shows you just the breadth and depth of creator talent that we had.
The PlayStation was obviously a much more powerful machine
and, you know, totally devoted to, "Okay, let's build a machine
"where the focus is that this will play games.
"This is built entirely around playing games."
There was no kind of pretence for, "This is a computer."
This is a games machine. This is an arcade in your home.
That's the beginning and the end of it.
All games gather here.
Full of games, PlayStation. Out now.
We had a hit.
We knew we were off and running to a very, very strong start.
Lots of PlayStations were exported from Japan
and brought home to the US and the UK and Europe
by a lot of the development community.
I would imagine at least 10,000 of those 100,000 ended up going abroad.
You could buy a Japanese PlayStation at the Computer Exchange
on Rathbone Place.
And they had a sign on the window, "The Mutt's Nuts."
And the word was out.
And that actually made our job in the US, in Europe, much, much easier,
because people could see the machine,
they could see the excitement that was coming out of Japan,
they could play the games,
and they could see the quality of what was possible.
The hype machine had already started
so people were champing at the bit for it,
and I think what they did with the price was the final nail in Sega's coffin,
because they undercut them to such an extent.
It was the first E3, and E3 was held in Los Angeles.
We had a very big booth.
We knew Nintendo would have a big booth, and Sega.
Sony Computer Entertainment was headed up by a fellow named Terry Tokunaka.
A very wise owl.
Typically a dignified Japanese who would not say a word for, like, three hours,
and then say one or two words and that was the end of the meeting, you know?
But he was smart.
We had a lot of competing tensions.
The guys who were making the hardware want it at margin,
the guys who were marketing it want the lowest price possible.
You've got to look at what the competition are doing.
And he was thinking about his cost in yen and what the prices could be,
and the price debates were 350, 399
and 299.
And they said, "No, we can't do it."
"349." "We can't do it."
So, the senior management from Japan left,
and then Olaf Olafsson stayed behind with Steve Race.
Steve Race said, "We've got to do 299.
"299 is the only thing that matters.
"It's the only thing that matters in the whole wide world.
"And if you don't want to be embarrassed, you've got to be at 299."
So, Olaf said, "Hmm. Let me think about it."
As far as pricing is concerned,
the only thing we knew at the time is what the bill of materials was.
So, then you have to step away from that
and say, "Well, what will the market stand?"
You know, "What's the right price point for this thing?"
And I think, probably the guy who was most influential in that was Olaf,
because people like Ken and Terry Tokunaka
just wanted desperately for this thing to be a success.
They know they've got a great piece of hardware.
They know they've got a great software catalogue.
Erm...
The only thing that can go wrong now is they miss their market somehow.
And then, we all went our way
and showed up the next morning for the big press event at the E3 centre.
And they had a speech from Nintendo and they had a talk from Sega,
and there might've been something else.
It finally came up. "And now, Sony. So, well, show us your stuff, Sony."
And they had all had, like, 30 minute talks.
Steve Race gets up, walks up to the podium and says, "299."
Walks off.
The place erupts.
I'm going to ask Sony Computer Entertainment President of America,
Steve Race, to join me for a brief presentation.
299.
It was the thing that was needed, especially for the US market,
where the competition was even stronger
than I was worried about in Europe.
I mean, you had these two monoliths,
and every third attempt into the market had been squashed very easily.
I think that decision was probably the right decision.
Probably a bit scary when you look at the PandL,
but it was the right decision.
It set our intent as a platform
and it completely destroyed the competition.
My reaction was, "Oh, shit, we're in trouble."
That this is a bad thing for Sega and a very good thing for Sony.
We started to see the response from retailers
in the United States, in Europe,
and starting to forecast what our launch was going to be.
And we started to see the volume that was starting to be forecast.
- The games are ready. - Are you?
And I knew that we were doing something special.
I knew that what we were doing
was not only reaching the creators and the developers,
but this was starting to permeate into the mass market.
But we knew that it was risky days, you know.
We knew that we had games to get us out the door,
keep us going for a few months,
but the library had to be built.
And therefore, it probably wasn't for a year or so in
until we could look back and see that, actually, yes, we were getting traction.
We could see the pipeline of games was filling up,
and we could see developers really coming on board then.
That gave me some confidence that I had made a good career choice.
It was a wonderful thing for the games business,
because it was a real shot in the arm.
It unlocked everybody again.
It hit reset on all of the sequels,
and people just trying to keep washing the dishes at that point.
We all get to hit reset and start again, and here's new hardware.
And anyone that wanted to compete against Sony
had to show up with pretty impressive hardware.
So it kind of... It moved the industry along.
I like those kind of disruptions. I think it's very helpful.
Very quickly, we had a really rich variety of games.
People were taking the 3D abilities of the machine
and sending it off in lots of different directions,
from an NBA basketball game through to Jumping Flash!,
the Japanese platform game, which was just gorgeous.
Ready to go?
Sony would get in every game ever published for PlayStation.
And so, we would have this cabinet of just everything.
And it was just, you know...
The games you would expect...
You know, the Madden, the GameDays, whatever.
And then, it was obscure shit from Japan
that you're like, "What is this?" Right?
And the two things I remember
was this game called something like Super Big Brother,
is what it was translated.
And it was a side-scrolling game
with digitized characters like Mortal Kombat arcade,
but they were these buff, almost naked dudes,
shooting shit out of their, like, penises.
Three, two, one, go!
We laughed and laughed about this game.
And then there was a wonderful game that was called...
I think it was called Incredible Crisis.
And it was just a collection of mini-games,
but the way they had done it
was it was tied together in the story
of this Japanese salaryman and him dealing with his family,
and dealing with his... I think, like, his teenage daughter and his wife.
And it was the first time I had played a game where it was fully interactive,
so it wasn't just like cut scenes, but it was...
It was really cool.
They told this very mundane story...
Not totally mundane. There was crazy shit happening.
But, you know, for video games it was a very simple story
about just this guy, this mild-mannered guy,
with these crazy mini-games.
We never got things like that in America. It was just too weird.
But I loved seeing a lot of those...
For us, obscure Japanese games
when they would come into the Sony offices.
Battle Arena Toshinden was the first 3D fighting game
that we had on the console.
Tekken, which came along, which is still amazing, still felt very 2D.
It's still very much that Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter kind of...
Even though there's some fantastic finishing sequences,
where Law would run up the body
and then come down and there was 3D within that.
It was Battle Arena Toshinden that truly showed off the early 3D
gaming potential.
Gran Turismo. For me, one of the greatest driving games ever made.
What an impact, what depth, what realism.
What addiction. I played that for 18 months solid, two hours a day,
and I still don't think I completely nailed it.
Then there was PaRappa the Rapper,
which is just so weird, and nuts and wonderful.
And Vib-Ribbon. See, Vib-Ribbon is the kind of game
that you'd never have seen in the cartridge years.
Who would have taken a chance on a game like that?
But here we were in the '90s with vectors on the screen.
You know, lines. And it's like, it's cool, it's great.
I remember playing Driver.
At the time, I was like, "This is unbelievable,"
because I hadn't played that kind of style of game
where the police are chasing me before.
And I found it so fun.
And that's the kind of thing, again, that the new generations deliver for us.
It was the first real open-world driving game, was Driver.
And it required new techniques, such as streaming the data,
the geometric and texture data off the CD drive in real-time,
so it didn't stop, pause, load and carry on.
And I think we really... We pushed the machine hard.
It was smoking by the time we'd done with it.
But the very early development stages of Driver,
it was very, very touch-and-go
whether we could achieve it, the open world.
Because most games at the time
were designed along, basically, a tube.
You could see everything in front of you
and you could control what you couldn't see.
Driver, of course, you could turn left or right at a junction.
It had to be aware of what was there.
It was controlling other cars in the city and people walking around.
The speed at which we were able to grow the development community,
particularly in the West,
was down to embracing the PC creators.
The PlayStation development kit
actually became a card that just slotted inside a PC.
And so, a lot of the tools and techniques and capabilities of the PC developers
were able to come over to PlayStation quite smoothly,
particularly in the areas of advanced 3D graphics,
where obviously PlayStation was positioning itself.
What was so nice about the original PlayStation
was that it was more like a PC than a console.
That's what made it really, really easy to develop for, as well,
because it had architecture that was a processor, a graphics processor,
which was what PCs hadn't got at that point, but they soon did.
And it just worked.
It just pulls across the PC code, and the graphics engine pulled that across
to use the graphics hardware.
So, it was a very, very nice machine to work on.
We didn't have to change any designs to be console specific
because we created everything on a PC.
We knew our limitations on the PC.
Sometimes, things didn't quite work out, or we could adjust it fairly quickly.
More so, things like how much we could display on screen at one time.
And as an artist, that was a fair bit of guesswork, really.
But, certainly, even testing the games...
From our point of view, when we created a level,
and output the game version,
everything we did was on the PC,
to the point where,
when we came to testing the game at the end of the project,
and we actually had to pick up a PlayStation controller to do it,
that was a big deal for me.
'Cause suddenly I had to try and translate everything I'd been doing
on my keyboard on the PC
to what I was doing on the console.
And believe you me, they made us test those levels on that console.
It was hard work.
The other side to this whole thing
was the fact that women, once you started playing Tomb Raider,
could associate with a female character in a game.
Now that was something we hadn't anticipated.
But we suddenly had a market for female gamers as well.
Lara Croft, without doubt,
the poster girl for that generation.
And I think the character and the personality of Lara Croft,
it started to take storytelling,
which is a feature of gaming that has developed in sophistication
immeasurably over the successive generations.
But, I think, with Tomb Raider at the time,
the concept of storytelling in video games
manifested itself to a really meaningful extent
probably for the first time.
Part of the PlayStation experience was it wasn't just big titles
like Crash or Tomb Raider or the like,
but also these conceptually driven...
You could almost call them indie titles, like Xi,
which I think was sold as Devil Dice in this country.
Or I.Q.: Intelligent Qube.
The jump from 16-bit to 32-bit was so incredibly significant.
I just got it straight away. I knew that this was going to be huge.
Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy VII, Resident Evil,
Time Crisis, Dino Crisis.
Games would come out which were just enormous for PlayStation.
The N64 was a different experience
as that came up and bubbled up halfway through.
But it didn't really take over.
Nintendo really dragged its heels over getting into 3D
and launching a new machine.
'Cause, you know, for obvious reasons.
The Super Famicom, the SNES, was doing great guns,
and it was reinvigorated by the likes of Donkey Kong Country.
But at the end of the day, it was still a cartridge system.
For every one launch on the N64,
there were a dozen PlayStation titles,
because they could just bombard the market with it.
I remember in the early days of PlayStation,
you would see somebody go in, get the console,
and get, literally, a stack of games to go with it.
Sony's marketing of the PlayStation was, I thought, incredibly exciting.
It didn't necessarily focus on games.
It just focused on this kind of new world
that people were going to be exploring and getting into.
And I think it was brilliant at the time
because there was very controversial elements to some of the marketing.
But it was something that really captured people's imaginations,
in terms of, "This isn't just a video games machine."
The US were very, very traditional in everything they did.
I think there was an element of free thinking that was in Europe.
Hello, citizens of Europe.
As spokesperson for S.A.P.S.,
the Society Against PlayStation,
I'd like to talk to you about a menace threatening humanity.
We launched with kind of a silly commercial,
a Reefer Madness kind of concept.
The anti-PlayStation society,
the Society Against PlayStation, S.A.P.S.
It will ruin your kid's brain and they'll come out jabbering monkeys.
So, it was aimed at the parents and really at the kids.
And here we have a fellow who's been experimenting with PlayStation
for only a few minutes.
Proof that we S.A.P.S. must be on our guard.
Remember, do not underestimate the power of PlayStation.
You had some really, really talented guys.
You know, Geoff Glendenning, who's a really, really clever guy.
And he didn't just think posters, print ads, that sort of thing.
He was looking at how he was going to get all eyes on PlayStation.
When I'd seen the PlayStation,
I felt that the market couldn't sustain three console companies,
and therefore, I also believed
that with the technology, with such a big leap,
that we could reposition it to a much older market.
A lot of those people had been gamers,
but had grown out of
where the market was ostensibly targeting,
which was really children of 16 and under, I'd say.
So, they were left with no form of digital entertainment
other than music and film.
So I think PlayStation kind of filled that gap.
But you were not going to fill that gap
unless you associated with what those people were doing at the time.
And at the time, you know, the club scene was big.
There had been a massive youth movement, if you like, in the UK.
Very much unique, globally,
that came out of the late '80s kind of rave culture and club culture.
By 1994, 1995,
was the biggest youth movement in the history of youth tribes.
If you put together through the 20th century,
you know, the mods, the rockers,
the hippies, the New Romantics, the skinheads.
Every youth movement came nowhere near as close as the participants
who took part in club culture.
UK dance culture in the '80s saw the birth of the rave scene.
And Ministry of Sound came along in 1991,
and was civilized raving, if you like.
Ministry of Sound, I guess,
was the best nightclub in the UK and globally.
It had become a global brand and it was taken from
the big New York warehouse clubbing scene,
and Ministry of Sound was the first super club, if you like.
But in 1995, they were having a huge refit.
I wouldn't call it upmarket,
but we had to remove the gaffer tape and the scaffolding
and start to build proper structures.
And we built two things.
One was an Absolut vodka bar in conjunction with Absolut.
But there was another space,
and that was where the intrigue and the idea started.
And that saw the birth of the famous PlayStation room at Ministry of Sound.
This PlayStation room, which was kind of just painted black,
with black consoles and black TVs on pedestals,
and, you know, you step down into it,
so it's almost like going into a little lair.
And it seemed such a natural thing to do,
to bring video gaming into a club environment.
PlayStation really made gaming cool.
Because, you know, you had two brands that were huge and successful,
brilliant game designers,
but in the public perception, you know, you had Mario and Sonic,
and they were perceived as being very young.
And so, when you had a grown-up brand like Sony
that made your mum and dad's television
and your Walkman and all the rest of it,
actually coming into the market, it was exciting.
And I think, that, coupled with the marketing at the time...
Suddenly, you'd open a copy of The Face
and you'd see hip kids wearing the PlayStation logo,
and they probably haven't played a game in their life,
but if they're embracing the brand as being something cool,
then that's kind of what made the whole video games market explode, I think.
For me, the quintessential PlayStation ad of all time
that still gets a good 10,000 hits a month, written by James Sinclair,
headed up by Trevor Beattie at TBWA, was Double Life.
For years I've lived a double life.
In the day I do my job.
I ride the bus, roll up my sleeves with the hoi polloi.
But at night, I live a life of exhilaration.
Of missed heartbeats and adrenaline.
And if the truth be known...
A life of dubious virtue.
I won't deny I've been engaged in violence,
even indulged in it.
I have maimed and killed adversaries,
and not merely in self-defence.
I've exhibited disregard for life...
Limb. And property.
And savoured every moment.
You may not think it to look at me...
But I have commanded armies...
And conquered worlds.
And though in achieving these things...
I have set morality aside...
I have no regrets.
It still gives me goosebumps whenever I see it.
I think it's utterly timeless.
If you put it up now on TV,
it still would be as fresh as it was back then.
It really captured the tone perfectly.
You just had to see the amplification effect
of all the marketing and promotion,
and games was cool.
And we were now a mainstream entertainment brand.
We were no longer a toy.
And it wasn't "geeks," and I say that in the most respectful way.
Weren't geeks that were playing games.
It was the "cool kids" that were playing video games.
It was an amazing time as a game creator
and as a game player.
That first PlayStation took away so many of the limitations
that we'd had in the past.
Suddenly, cartridges... Didn't have to worry about cartridges.
We had 600 megabytes on the CD-ROM.
As far as hardware went, powerful, and in 3D as well.
It was a revolution.
So the hardware team behind PlayStation One...
As soon as the hardware was finished,
they went on to two new projects.
They went on to a cost-reduction project,
which was same format, same capability, but just making it cheaper and cheaper.
The second team, the advance team,
then went and started working on
a version of the PlayStation chipset for the arcades.
Before the PlayStation was released as a home console,
work was already underway on Namco's System 11 arcade board.
This board incorporated some of the PlayStation architecture,
such as the CPU, which was developed by Mr. Kutaragi's team.
what Namco was most surprised by
was the cost, how cheap it was.
To be able to make something with that capability
for that price, was pretty surprising.
What Mr. Kutaragi was trying to do at that time,
by making a low cost polygon chip
available to the global market,
marked a paradigm shift in the polygon era.
Although Namco had a board
with better polygon technology and capabilities,
this was an interesting business model for us,
and we continued to work with Mr. Kutaragi.
And once that project had been finished,
the team behind that
then started to think about what was going to be PlayStation 2.
Those days were quite a roller-coaster of new hardware to play with
because we were also looking at PocketStation as well,
which was going to come out in '99 in Japan.
And so, we heard the PlayStation 2 was coming.
We heard that it was essentially taking some of the experiences
that our colleagues in Japan had,
and it was going to be the next iteration of hardware.
But not just an evolution. It had to be a revolution,
because it also had to last for a good decade.
And we had to take the best hardware that we could at the time
to create that PlayStation 2.
And with PlayStation 2, we built our own chip manufacturing facilities
and we invested a huge amount of money
in designing our own graphics chip and hardware,
that meant we were much more in control of our own destiny.
We could build a much, much higher-performance device
that would leapfrog orders of magnitude
beyond what even the PC and the workstations were doing.
There was quite a shock
when people found out what kind of hardware was in PS2.
Because I think we all expected PS1 plus.
So, PlayStation One had been really neat, very easy,
compared, to say, with the Saturn, for example.
So everyone expected the PlayStation 2
to be more of the same. And they didn't.
They actually produced something with, you know, 16 processors
and chips doing this and chips doing that.
So it was an absolute nightmare, 'cause it was nothing like a PC.
The PS2 is very much geared to do polygonal 3D.
I mean, that's pretty much what everybody used it for,
and it does it at a much faster rate than the PS1.
And one of the biggest differences between the PS1 and PS2
is the speed of access to the graphical memory.
On the PS2, the speed of access to the graphical memory
is just ridiculously high.
It finally let us do these frame-based graphical effects,
and stencils and shadows
and all this extra stuff that we couldn't do until then.
And then you had the two vector units,
which were incredibly awesome,
super-high throughput vector-processing designs,
with their own weird buses and DMA and very small memory footprints.
And, like, no typical software would ever run on them.
You basically had to write really custom assembly engines
to power these things.
And that's what most people didn't do.
Like, we had a ton of them in Jak and Daxter,
and you could basically,
fifty to one hundredfold the speed of some particular operation,
if it was something that could be done while in the vector unit,
and you spent, like, two months
crafting a vector unit system to handle it.
But it made the program enormously complicated.
You had to get really down and dirty with this hardware,
and get really comfortable writing, you know, simple programs,
but you're uploading into these vector units
that are impossibly challenging to debug
when something goes wrong, and things can go wrong in so many different ways.
When I started at Sony Japan,
I started working behind closed doors, basically, on the PlayStation 2,
and I wrote simulators to simulate what the new chips would be doing.
They were called the VU1 and the VU0.
Kutaragi at the time was saying that he wanted non-polygonal 3D,
even though it didn't really quite come to that.
Initially, I kind of managed to make a system using the VU1 chip
that would actually break down curved data into polygonal data,
and then spit that out to be rendered as polygons.
So, eventually, the final stage was polygons,
but the data which was being processed wasn't polygons.
It was just curved data information.
And so, using all these techniques,
I managed to pull together this duck-in-a-bath demo
with, like, water and reflections,
and, you know, using all these techniques we didn't have access to until then,
which most people don't realize isn't using polygonal data.
It's using curve surface data,
which at the time was very new, very different.
Phil Harrison had come to Foster City
and he showed us this water demo.
And I remember exactly the words.
He's like, "Can you just imagine Lara Croft..."
Who was ruling the roost those days.
The biggest game out was Tomb Raider.
He's like, "Can you imagine her diving into that water?"
And it just fired everybody's imagination. Certainly mine.
Like, "Oh, my God, yeah, this is next level stuff."
I was invited in very early on PlayStation 2,
as were Naughty Dog and Insomniac,
because we'd been creating these big titles for PlayStation One.
And, in particular,
I ended up going on a sabbatical to Japan for three months,
and working out of a locked room
where the very first prototypes were kept.
I was sitting side-by-side with the people who were making the demos
that would be used for the announcement of PlayStation 2.
But my role was not to make a demo.
My job was to do the early work that hopefully would lead to the engines
of what became Ratchet and Clank and Jak and Daxter.
Man, that stung!
I told you we shouldn't have come here and you listened!
What?
With Jak and Daxter, we went to open world,
taking a cue off Mario and Banjo-Kazooie,
but we wanted to try to make more intense gameplay
with the open world,
and there was a lot of learning curve there.
With PlayStation 2, we were finally able to have vistas.
I mean, we could not restrict the player to a smaller area
like we'd been doing on PlayStation One.
You could see into the distance,
you could see where you were heading as a player.
That was one of the core concepts behind Jak and Daxter.
Let's have this broad, completely connected world
and just let you explore it.
And I don't feel that would've been possible
at any reasonable level of graphical quality on PlayStation One.
We pursued this whole giant, seamless world thing successfully,
but it was just brutally difficult on the design and the technical aspects.
We had to deal with the PlayStation itself,
which, like, to max out involved... Just in that one game,
we rewrote most of the main systems, including the graphics systems,
sometimes, like, five times.
We knew the theoretical performance we could get out of some system,
and because the other ones, while they function,
we just weren't near it, because it was so difficult.
So we would just keep rewriting and rewriting
till we got closer and closer to the theoretical performance.
We had a lot more power,
but the expectations were so much higher for what people wanted.
PS2 had been... It had definitely been hyped,
and we had been part of the hyping process, right? We were all excited.
We went from 2D to 3D,
and now we're going the next leap forward in terms of what 3D can be.
So, we had to come up with ways to render
much more complex objects, larger vistas and more detailed characters.
And our intent was to demonstrate
that we could move beyond the PlayStation One.
We could take advantage of the PlayStation 2
and build these immense cities,
and at the same time,
not move too far away from this love of comedy, these stylized characters.
Please return your appendages to the steering mechanism, sir.
Huh? Oh, right. Sorry.
Oh, and by the way, you can stop calling me "sir."
The name's Ratchet.
Pleased to make your acquaintance, sir.
You got a name?
My serial number is B54296...
Oops! I'll just call you Clank for short.
The leap from PlayStation One to PlayStation 2 was massive,
and people could feel... As exciting as PlayStation One was going for 3D,
the extra processing power, the Emotion Engine that the CPU...
And running off a DVD,
again, gave so much more freedom to the developers.
With Orange Games, who became Guerrilla Games, at the time
had a great prototype called Marines that they were calling a budget shooter.
It didn't quite work out as being a "budget" shooter,
but it turned into Killzone and it was fantastic.
And I remember when they first showed Helghasts
dropping down wires from the ship into the battle,
it blew you away, and you knew what was going to be possible on that platform.
They've got me pinned down!
In my mission to subdue the success of Xbox,
I went on a massive campaign looking for exclusives,
because we had signed up Tomb Raider,
and in Europe, we had Formula One on exclusive.
And exclusive titles sell hardware.
We were in Los Angeles at the Sunset Marquis hotel
and I called up Kelly Sumner
and said, "Tell me anything you've got you want to talk about exclusivity on."
So he came with this title called "State of Emergency."
It was a little title about some sort of a disturbance, a riot,
and people running into electronic stores,
running out with TVs and things.
It was a great title. It did well, too. It was funny.
And then I did something with Eutechnyx called Big Mutha Truckers.
You know, so they weren't all big.
But Kelly, at six o'clock on the night before E3,
he said, "Well, we could talk about Grand Theft Auto."
I think, if you ask guys,
"If you could do anything you wanted to do tonight, what would you do?"
"I'd shoot my boss,
"I'd drive a fast car."
And so, I think that's part of what made GTA successful.
It was giving people the ability to realize their fantasies.
I said, "Okay, Kelly, let's do it."
And finally, the US demanded in on the deal,
but they didn't want to know anything about it when I first did it.
They weren't into paying for exclusivity,
but I said, "Rule number one, two, three, four.
"Install the base."
How do you install base? Exclusive titles.
It was one of the first games I think I played from beginning to end.
It was just hugely compelling, and, you know, you felt like
it was a little bit morally dubious,
but it was just brilliant fun.
Stop!
You know, it always amused me when you'd read media reports about,
"You could do this, you could kill these people or do whatever."
But the reality is you don't have to do those things.
You're driving around a city that's a full living city
and there's people on the sidewalk.
You don't have to drive over them.
If you've got a sandbox where you can do whatever you want to do,
you know, that's something that's quite revolutionary.
I don't think GTA could've been done on PlayStation One.
I think it would've been incredibly difficult to do.
They were incredibly powerful machines,
but you had to be a magician to actually make it do what you wanted.
We were really pushing things,
and I think we'd had the experience in 3D to make GTA,
and like the concept of streaming.
Streaming was a big risk.
You couldn't drive inside a machine, constantly move for 24 hours straight
and not melt.
It ended up it did work.
Yeah, I think Grand Theft Auto is the game that most people would refer to as
the moment that games grew up
and became more than just a form of trivial entertainment,
but actually could become as important as movies or music or literature.
Liberty City is in shock today as the police and emergency services...
PS1 to PS2 felt, again, like a significant upgrade
in terms of graphical prowess and all the rest of it.
You know, Kutaragi -san talked about the Emotion Engine.
You know, all the chips had their little names, like the Emotion Engine,
and this whole premise, "Could a video game make you cry?"
It was like... For a game, it was inspiring that,
you know, this empowered people to tell stories
that could actually really move you
in the way that a really good song or a good film could move you.
The process of moving from Ico to Shadow of the Colossus
wasn't entirely smooth.
Personally, I was happy with Ico
and players were happy with it too
Take lighting as an example
a lot of video imagery at that time
was not preoccupied with shadow and contrast
there was a lot of pre-rendered and CG video around
and games with loud and flashy graphics
I was interested in more subtle approaches
to shades and tones that were closer to reality
I think that's what differentiated us at that time
but it wasn't a great commercial success
so I came up with Shadow of the Colossus
But whether it's the story, the backdrop, the movement
it's all about making the player believe the characters are real
that they exist for real in that world
for me, that's what it's all about it
The most effective way of bringing characters to life
is through the story of that world
I always incorporate a story in my games
but I don't necessarily create games to tell stories
The significance of PlayStation
For me personally
I feel I was able to become a games designer and developer
because of PlayStation
My favourite game of the PS2 era,
and I hope what many would consider the reference work of the PS2 era,
was God of War.
The gods of Olympus have abandoned me.
I would put God of War up there as one of my top five video games of all time.
There is no God of War without Ray Harryhausen,
and there is no God of War without Raiders of the Lost Ark,
because those two things... Down to the fact that when Kratos,
in one of the first levels of God of War,
pushes his body up against this pillar
and uses his lower body strength
to kick the pillar to cause it to collapse...
I'm telling the animators, like,
"Look what Indiana Jones does in the Well of the Souls
"where he kicks that giant Anubis statue.
"That's exactly what I want this to evoke."
And that was what God of War was really built on,
is the desire
to make a playable version of Raiders or Clash of the Titans
that makes you feel like the star of those movies.
So, I put all of these...
At the time, decades of wannabe film director
into this one product,
and said, "This is my shot to express that."
That was the beginning and the reason God of War exists
in terms of why I pitched it.
How much is enough, Kratos?
When will it end?
When the glory of Sparta is known throughout the world.
"The glory of Sparta."
We knew we would have to use some cut scenes,
but we really wanted to try to do as much storytelling in gameplay
because we knew that that would be a more powerful way
to express storytelling.
Suddenly, we were like,
"Wow. You're going to be experiencing more than just this gameplay.
"You're going to be taking on the role and the emotional impact
"of this scenario.
"We want you to step into the sandals of Kratos,
"who is this vicious killer."
And so, it was just a lot of conscious gameplay design
about wherever we could fit character in gameplay,
that was always the way we would go.
And it was very hard to do,
and it added a lot of stress to the team and a lot of time to the schedule
because we were saying gameplay and storytelling can be fused together,
and they really should be the same thing where we can do that as often as we can.
So that was a big pillar, philosophically, when it came to developing that game.
Sony PlayStation 2 will be the biggest thing to come along
since TV was invented.
I'm ready. Everyone's ready, right?
Who wants a PlayStation 2?
PS2 was definitely a lot more powerful than the first PlayStation.
It was a quantum leap in terms of what it could offer.
But what a lot of people maybe don't remember
is that for the first couple of years there wasn't that much coming out for it.
Especially not from third parties.
Why? Because it was an absolute pig to program.
If I'm going to be polite about it.
Because, unless you'd had some grounding in assembler,
you were never going to get the best out of that complex hardware.
So that was the price you paid.
Yes, you get more power.
The price you pay
is you have to know how to get the best out of those vector units,
which meant old-school assembler-like skills.
People did get it eventually.
And I think, had PlayStation not had the momentum from PlayStation One,
then they might have found it harder to convince people
that the PS2 was an amazing system.
It was an amazing system,
but people had to invest a lot of RandD to start to get the best out of it.
So, you had to wait two, three, four years
for the third parties to find their feet on PS2.
But when they did... You know, the results speak for themselves.
Silent Hill 2. The visual leap was notable.
You know, you went from having very, very obviously polygon shapes,
to suddenly rounded characters
that are moving within these 3D environments.
Gran Turismo really showed off, graphically, what it could do.
And then you get Tekkens for it.
The visuals are so, so much better.
It wasn't just polish, it was a sense of ambition again,
and people were just having fun with it again.
The ethos of "anyone can create for this" was still there.
We'd had a lot of success with Formula One on PlayStation One.
We took the license for World Rally Championship
and that first WRC just blew you away
in terms of a look of a racing game at that time.
You look at games that came out of the London Studio
like SingStar and EyeToy: Play,
their game interface was either the camera for EyeToy: Play,
or a microphone for SingStar.
So it made it a lot more inclusive, and it's something
I think PlayStation's always been about,
wanting to include not just publishers and developers,
but all sorts of different players as well.
Pro Evo really exploded at that point
and PlayStation 2 was the era of Pro Evolution Soccer.
It's coming back now in terms of its popularity,
but everybody would go and play Pro Evo.
Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings...
Big licenses were selling bucketloads.
I mean, I remember one Christmas, PS2 came out
and you had Harry Potter, one of the Lord of the Rings titles,
FIFA and Grand Theft Auto,
and just selling tens and tens of thousands of these things.
So, hugely successful era for Sony.
I think for buyers of the PlayStation,
who loved the brand and who loved the product...
I think it was maybe a little bit of an easier sell
to say this is the newest, latest, upgraded version of what you love already.
I think that was probably not as challenging.
I mean, the marketing at the time was fairly left-field.
David Lynch came in to direct the advert.
It was brilliantly surreal.
Where are we...
Disembodied arms coming out of people's mouths,
talking ducks wearing suits and stuff.
It was straight out of Twin Peaks.
Welcome to the Third Place.
PlayStation 2. The Third Place.
And I loved it.
And I don't think anyone understood it,
but, you know, when you're that enigmatic a brand
people kind of imbue you with all sorts of wisdom
when they see crazy stuff,
and, you know, it obviously joined the ranks of all the other advertising
that we'd done with Chris Cunningham and the likes of that.
Space pixies and all sorts.
And, you know, it became part of our history.
One of the little-appreciated facts, and it's almost rather mundane,
is the fact that the PS2 was a DVD player.
And we were by far the cheapest DVD player on the market.
So, certainly, we were principally, primarily, a video gaming console,
but having that secondary feature of being a really cheap DVD player,
that helped us a lot.
And in Spain, the size of the market tripled overnight
because our managing director, James Armstrong,
made campaigns about DVD.
And, of course, the Japanese PlayStation people went berserk.
"You should've been advertising GT."
"Hey, you know, people don't have DVDs.
"They're going to have to pay the same price
"for a DVD player as a PlayStation."
I said, "Buy a DVD player and get a PlayStation free."
It was kind of the message.
And it worked. Spain had an amazing success with that positioning.
Amazing.
PlayStation 2 has set the benchmark in terms of ambition, even today,
for what modern video games can and should be,
in terms of storytelling, epic graphics, open world,
action, fun, excitement.
Absolutely.
Because the PS2 was such an enormous success,
I suspect PlayStation as an organization
felt like
they could get away with pretty much anything.
And a $2 billion investment into a brand-new chip
that was touted as a supercomputer
could be seen as probably
the bravest gamble ever made,
or one of the most dangerous follies ever committed by a large company,
or, potentially, one of the greatest acts of self-harm.
You could spin it either way.
The Blu-ray drive when Blu-ray wasn't quite ready.
It was like a version 0.9 Blu-ray drive that was in the original PS3,
which was a vastly expensive thing to manufacture.
For an engine developer, the PS3 was... It was a really unique beast
with the cell architecture.
To me, I felt like... A little bit of, "Holy crap, I've gotta...
"I've got to rethink a lot of things to make good use of this."
When we heard about the PlayStation 3,
we saw an opportunity to get out early on a platform,
something we really hadn't done before.
And the opportunity to be a launch title was incredibly enticing for us.
So, we came up with Resistance,
this world where the Earth's history was different,
thanks to the arrival of an alien species.
Russia and Europe have fallen.
Resistance: Fall of Man was challenging in a lot of ways.
It was our first launch title.
So that made it hard,
just because you're dealing with hardware that's...
Hardware that's new, the documentation isn't there yet,
the operating system is constantly getting changed around,
you don't know how much memory you're really going to have at launch
'cause the operating system is taking a chunk of it.
In some sense, it was an awesome design
for how much power you could get for the price.
And in another sense, it was so different than everything else
that it was hard for people to take advantage of it.
I learned a lot of things in the process of working on Resistance.
One of the big ones was don't do a launch title.
Particularly, don't do a launch title
for a hardware as complex as PlayStation 3 was.
It was perhaps the most difficult project
that I have worked on in my career.
Yeah, launch titles. Yeah, nerves. There's a lot of expectation.
But so exciting as well.
And trying to push things as far as you can
on a new platform, in a fixed time frame,
it's the biggest challenges you're going to get
as a creator or a developer.
MotorStorm, I think, was one of the definitive
products for PlayStation 3.
You're building ahead of the launch of the hardware, install base zero.
So, Sony have a role to play there, to invest in the product with you.
And it becomes one of the definitive properties on PlayStation 3
because it's new.
Right? Because it's innovative.
MotorStorm, to me, epitomized what a launch title is all about,
something that's fresh and innovative in an existing genre.
Planet Earth.
Or as the rest of the omniverse call it,
the Orb of Dreamers.
The birth of LittleBigPlanet was
we'd managed to organize a meeting with Phil Harrison,
who was the top man at the time at Sony.
Phil Harrison really latched on to the user-created content side of it.
I was really getting excited
by this idea of being able to make a tool that lets you make games,
which kind of felt like part of my spiritual mission somehow. It's like...
"Well, back in the day I remember how excited I was about making games
"and how hard it was to get into the industry.
"We can do this thing that allows people to make games on consoles,
"which is otherwise really inaccessible for them to make games on."
And then, Phil Harrison says, "Well, we want to show this at GDC.
"We've got this big announcement thing and we'd like to show it there."
And we were like, "Okay, no pressure."
To Sony, who were actually getting quite a hard time,
you know, with the PlayStation One and 2.
They'd been really successful. When you used to go to computer shows,
getting a ticket to the Sony party was like gold dust.
Everyone wanted to go to the Sony parties, 'cause they were so extravagant.
They used to spend ridiculous amounts of money.
But by the time we'd hooked up with Sony,
they were starting to get a lot of flak in the press.
PlayStation 3 was too expensive,
and they were getting a lot of negative press, essentially.
We showed LittleBigPlanet at GDC
and it literally seemed to turn the tide overnight.
Suddenly, there was all this love and attention
coming towards Sony for backing this thing.
And it got to the point where Sony said to us,
"Well, this Sackboy character that you've got, we really like it.
"We're kind of thinking of using it as the mascot for the PlayStation 3."
We're like, "Wow. That's amazing."
It's like Mario or this kind of stuff, you know. It was great.
So, I mean, that was obviously the basis of a great relationship with Sony.
We liked what they'd done for us and they liked what we did for them, and...
I don't know.
We've been happily married ever since, to be honest with you.
Dear PlayStation, I got my boyfriend a PS3,
and he still hasn't hooked it up to the Internet.
What? What is this, 1992? I know.
I mean, if you're not on the PlayStation Network,
you can't get PlayStation Home, PS One Classics,
you can't download movies, TV shows... I know!
It's like having a bathroom without an aromatherapy candle.
Still gets the job done, but come on! He hates...
Back then, the ability to sell your games digitally only
and make the games digitally from the ground up,
meant everything.
Because up until that point, every design decision you made was about,
is it compelling enough to put in a $60 box
that the buyers at Toys "R" Us or Best Buy or Target or Walmart
are going to vibe with?
And you were a slave to that $60 price point,
and you were a slave to make sure that your content
had to appeal to those buyers.
And now suddenly, that we were going to open up a digital storefront,
and we could make games that were only two hours,
we could make games that cost $4 versus $60.
Literally, that's game-changing,
because those shackles were now removed.
So, with Calling All Cars!, it was us going,
"Let's make a game that we grew up playing, like arcade games,
"or games we played in college,
"like NBA Jam or NFL Blitz or whatever."
And that was the impetus,
that we would have never been able to make that game on PS2 or One,
not because of the technology,
but because we couldn't convince retail to carry a game that small.
I gave an interview once where I compared Calling All Cars! to a pop song
and God of War was an opera.
But we could never make pop songs.
Now we can make singles, right?
So that was awesome.
So PS3 was many things to many different people.
It was definitely a difficult period,
because a lot of work had to be done
to turn around the technical deficit and the monetary deficit
created by the launch of this extraordinary piece of hardware.
'Cause it was an extraordinary piece of hardware.
It was also extraordinarily hard to get the best out of.
But people did, and it did eventually turn into a success.
But, my God, was that a war of attrition.
The PS3 clawed it back.
It lost Sony huge amounts of money over its lifecycle.
I mean, they sold a hell of a lot of them,
but it was by far the least profitable console Sony's ever had,
and it took, actually, Sony years to recover from that.
The PlayStation that emerged at the end of PS3
was a much more gritty, determined, focused entity
than, I would say...
And I'm not saying this in a personal perspective,
but from a corporate perspective.
A much more hubristic organization at the beginning of the PS3 era.
Ah, this fast healing stuff is going to come in real handy.
Before we launched the PS4,
there were some observers who rightly or wrongly thought
this could be the end of Sony.
Not just PlayStation. Sony.
There was a lot at stake.
And because of this, I have to say, I'm enormously impressed
by the bravery and the vision of the leadership of the organization
to deliver a focused device,
one that was much less confused and much more developer-oriented again.
It was like going back to the beginning.
"Let's make a machine that developers love."
In the early days, we were riding on hardware.
We used hardware. It was very bespoke in some cases.
It took a lot of time to get to grips in a lot of cases as well.
But the individuals that were involved were small in number,
but able to make it happen on PlayStation.
But the time we get to the PlayStation 4 era,
we're talking about much larger teams.
Not everybody is a specialist in console hardware.
We had to make it far broader in appeal to games teams.
And I think with PlayStation 4, we succeeded.
So the strategy was set,
the hardware was focused,
and all that remained was launch and reception.
Partners were there, developers were involved.
Even independent developers were involved in the launch of PS4.
The pricing had been set.
Decisions about DRM and so on,
which had been so controversial in other events,
had also been made.
I think even we were surprised
at just how rapturous the reception was for PS4.
Because it was a kind of redemption as well.
We'd been through the fire with PS3.
And now everything was on the line.
We had to get this right.
And if we didn't, it could've been the end.
What we didn't expect
was that it would be such an incredible success,
beyond our wildest dreams.
But it was the tone with which we communicated the whole thing...
"This is for the players."
This is for the players.
For those that leap into battle in the blink of an eye.
For the drivers that compete for their club
no matter where they are.
The entire focus of launch was around players.
You remember the hubris from the PS3 years.
Contrast that with the honesty and self-deprecation
of the PS4 launch period,
and you can see that the organization had become transformed,
to people who were now humble, passionate and excited
about this new thing.
Battle-worn but ready to serve again.
That attitude, that spirit
that all began with the first PlayStation.
One of the things we can say about PlayStation
throughout the history is
there's always been innovation there.
Obviously, on the hardware side,
you know, right back to the first controller,
and then the DualShock and the systems on from there,
you know, there's always been a desire for innovation.
And I think that's always been partnered with
a strong desire and a commitment to innovation in gameplay.
PlayStation's always been passionate about a breadth of experiences
and giving new, different, innovative experiences to gameplay.
You know, you can take that right the way through to VR,
which is, again, about bringing new, different kinds of gameplay experiences,
to people.
You know, it's something that PlayStation's always been strong on.
Never shy to commit to providing
a really strong, innovative lead for the industry.
Virtual reality, which, as yet, is an unproven space,
but we're really intrigued and really excited by it.
I think developers are still continuing to come to terms
with what makes a great virtual reality gaming experience.
On a normal game, you'll just get all the gameplay in
and you'll optimize at the end.
But on a VR game, you have to be optimized right at the start,
and you kind of have to work within that constraint.
So you're starting with a...
"We must have 60 frames a second, 90 frames a second,
"120 frames a second."
And that's the key thing that you have to hit.
If you don't do that,
then you're going to be in problems all the way through your development.
We also... We have this slightly silly expression,
which is a lot of our ordinary non-VR games,
turn everything up to 11.
You need to saturate the player
and excite them and get everything going.
Well, we actually had to reverse that ruling in VR.
We had to turn everything down to seven,
because turning things up to 10, let alone 11,
was just too much.
You couldn't cope with it. Your mind can't cope with it in VR
if it's that much going on at the time.
You need to pace things more carefully in VR.
When I look at VR, we're now inside the game.
Now, you think as a game creator, as a game designer,
that's a paradigm shift totally.
'Cause we're taking it from the television
and putting the player inside the game now.
I think that VR will be a major shift.
In the games up until the present
all of the video, screens, etc.
have been put into a square layout
that is there to hold information.
We've had film as a medium
for over 100 years now and this is the first time
that we've broken through this frame.
Being able to now create art, film, and games
that don't fit into this frame,
and the question
of how to go about expressing this...
I think that the next 2 to 3 years
will major for this medium
in terms of how creators and artists
will use it, and what they will create.
Yeah, there are a lot of tricks and tips and things
that everyone's learning in VR.
What you can do, what you can't do.
Can you move the camera? Can you not?
How do you move around the environment?
You've got to match the visuals with the feeling of movement,
and other stuff like that.
So, and we're all learning all the time.
We're pioneering a new form of visual language,
just as the early filmmakers had to work out how edits work,
how fades and dissolves, how cutaways work.
All of that kind of language,
which most people watching something won't even think about,
because it's just something they intrinsically know
from watching lots of telly and film.
And in games, we have the same kind of stuff.
But in VR, that language doesn't work in the same way.
You have to unlearn those edits,
you have to unlearn that fade.
You can't use those things anymore
because they just don't work.
Because it's your view and you're in that environment.
If you jump somebody to another location, it feels weird,
because you physically jumped, but you haven't physically jumped.
So, you get a disconnect between the senses
and your rational, kind of calculating part of your brain.
So we are dealing with inventing a new set of grammar
for a new kind of medium.
And I think the distinction between
what's a gaming experience and a non-gaming experience,
which hitherto has been, you know, really clear, really binary,
I think those lines will start to blur
and you will have VR experiences with a certain
light touch of interactivity,
but which still technically might be games.
Some of those could be some of the finest
virtual reality entertainment experiences you will ever have
but they will be very simple to enjoy.
So I think there are a lot of opportunities in VR
that we haven't got a clue about.
But it gives you...
It's ultimately immersive.
You're through the looking glass in VR.
I've not met anybody yet who's experienced VR
who's not been blown away by it.
I think people get the excitement of it,
they get what they see now,
but they also get where it can go in the future.
The legacy of PlayStation
and the intent of PlayStation is in the name.
It was to combine play, fun, entertainment
with what you could do with technology from a workstation.
And that's where those two words come from.
"Play" and "station," meaning "PlayStation" together.
I think that Sony put together
a fantastic team for the PlayStation.
They had members from both Sony and Sony Music
two entirely different teams.
And there were people like me
coming from outside of Sony.
All three types of members
put their heads together for the PlayStation.
This incredible product
would never have been created
if Sony hadn't decided on making the PlayStation
A lot of people from different fields
were able to come together
and work on gaming hardware.
The biggest thing I took away from it
was being able to participate in this.
The success was not just about the hardware.
We were very lucky with CD coming to fruition.
The opportunities that CD provided,
but also, I think, we were able to provide a product which was very affordable.
It was appealing to quite a different age group
than other machines at the time.
And, therefore, it was a combination of hardware, marketing,
but also some great developers
who were able to fortunately make the leap from 2D to 3D,
because that was not a given in those days.
And bringing all these things together,
ultimately, we were fortunate in our success,
but the success was not without a lot of hard work.
I think the most lasting legacy of the first PlayStation was that
as it was a CD-ROM-based hardware and succeeded in the marketplace,
that meant that, finally, the economics started working
for the game creators rather than against the game creators.
PlayStation has been a massive step,
a massive moment, for the home console games market.
I think what PlayStation brought to it...
Obviously, innovation and new ways to play,
but also this inclusive spirit.
We really wanted to include the best talent, the best creators,
third parties, publishers,
because we know the more people we can include
making games, making the best games possible,
the better it is for the players.
And we've always put the players
at the heart of what PlayStation should be about.
When I first joined the PlayStation team I was in my early 20s
and one thing that everyone was talking about then
was the desire to make playing video games a cooler activity.
Everyone was saying that.
This was one of the goals in making the PlayStation.
Perhaps then, it's fair to say
that their goals have come true now.
Video games are definitely a normal part of our lifestyle now.
The fact that adults can play them without feeling self-conscious
is a pretty major effect that the PlayStation
has had on us, wouldn't you say?
I personally feel that this is so.
They've done so much...
You know, IP creation, wonderful games, wonderful tech,
now into VR.
But I think one of the core things
that PlayStation really did for the industry was really
throw those doors open to everyone and say, "Games can be for all of us."
It's not just this very small niche hobby.
It is a viable medium of entertainment.
And now, a real Japanese guy
from a really big Japanese company.
In Japan.