Most kids have never heard of Ken Kutaragi. But he is the man behind the video game Play Station.
Since the humble play station launch, there have been many other commercial successes and evolutions or spin-offs of the product. And while ‘Kutaragi’ is not a household name, his invention the Play Station – has almost become an essential item for many in the developed world!
- Top Marks ! Great Department Store
At the time of this invention, Mr. Kutaragi was an employee of Sony.
Its interesting to wonder about the internal politics at play during that era – late 1980′s – as this Sony employee convinced the giant international corporation to commericialise ‘toys’. Sony had not been into manufacturing toys – hence Mr. Kutaragi had to convince his critics that the product would be a money spinner.
The result of the launch of Play Station was a multi-billion dollar business and a new commerical division for the Sony Corporation.
The evolution looks like an obvious course or chain of events now, but I am sure that the initial developments of this IP must have been fraught with difficulties …. perhaps as with most things?
And the latest from play-station appears to be that they are launching a blog themselves. Hope they have as much success with their blogging as the play station itself.
- Ken Kutaragi
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New blog posting, Play Station – http://tinyurl.com/omejdo
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Something interesting about the PlayStation is that it could have been a Nintendo product !
When Nintendo ruled the 16-bit console market, Sony showed a CD-rom based project to Nintendo (project “PlayStation”) but Nintendo declined, because they could get more royalties with the cartridges that they were manufacturing.
Then Sony decided to develop the project itself (leaded by Kutaragi) and became number 1, beating Nintendo for over a decade with the PS1 and the PS2.
Bad mojo for Kutaragi and Sony now : they were so arrogant and so sure to win the next-gen battle with their PS3 that they’re now in 3rd place, behind Microsoft and FAR behind Nintendo, who got his throne back !
Kutaragi has also been evicted because of his mistakes…