Make Way for the PS2

the story so far. I covered in that recent episode how Ken Kutaragi, the so called father of the PlayStation, had to develop Sony's first video game console essentially out of view of the company's board members, who are more keen on pursuing a collaboration with Nintendo at the time.

But the Nintendo partnership never produced a consumer product, and I'm not even sure if there were ever any working prototypes that came out of this project, because Nintendo kind of kill hold it all off without ever making an official announcement about the program being canceled. Kutaragi was confident that Sony could build a CD ROM based video game system as opposed to Nintendo's cartridge based system that would

not just compete, but would outperform the competition. Now, it almost wasn't called the PlayStation, by the way, Kutaragi wanted to call it that. In fact, that was the name of the proposed Nintendo and Sony peripheral for the Supernintendo, though at that time that version of the PlayStation was two words play station, and Kutaragi wanted to create a game console called PlayStation one word big P big S. When Sony CEO Norrio Oga gave the thumbs up, it

was going to be called PlayStation. Sony had already even registered the name. Everything was ready to go, but as a courtesy, they brought the idea to the founder of Sony, Akio Morita. This is sort of a very traditional approach in jeb and Theese business. It was a sign of respect to the founder. Now, Marita loved the idea of the video game console. He liked the idea of getting into that industry, and everything was great, except he hated the name, and he said that they should change it.

So reluctantly they began to search for a new name, and then a couple of months later, Marita sadly suffered a severe stroke and it was bad enough to keep him from returning to work. The team hadn't found a new name at that point, and everything was already ready to go under the PlayStation name so Oga. The CEO quietly kind of gave the go ahead for them to stick with that name after all. One thing I didn't really cover in the previous episode was how Kutaragi came

across to his superiors and his subordinates. Stubborn would probably be a good adjective to use, traditional another good adjective, aggressive is another one. Shigeyo Maruyama said in interviews that while he was a manager at the time and Kutaragi was an engineer at the time, Kutaragi would sometimes treat

Shigeyo like he was the subordinate. At one point, angry that Shigeo wasn't doing whatever it was that Kutaragi wanted done, Kutaragi said that Shigeo should quit, and according to Shigeyo, who seemed pretty good natured about the whole thing, Kutaragi was like a temperamental artist who didn't believe in apologizing even if he knew he was the one in the wrong. So he's definitely a visionary, but he also sounds like the kind of guy I wouldn't really want to work with.

Kutaragi also encountered issues when he tried to work with his counterparts in the United States. He was in charge of the Sony PlayStation project, a huge deal. However, that wasn't reflected in his official title, which was more or less like assistant manager. The business hierarchy in Japan is really rigid. Companies have strict rules in place that limit when someone could be even eligible to apply for a

position with a larger title. So while Kutaragi was leading the PlayStation efforts and his decisions were the ones that completely guided the development of that console, his title was translated into assistant manager essentially, and that meant that his US counterparts weren't really listening to him. I mean, why would they. They were all executives, right, They had big, important titles. And now I should add that does not necessarily reflect a person's capability, or their wisdom, or their

knowledge or anything like that. But titles are sometimes seen as more important than those qualities because because humans are silly creatures I guess anyway, Kutaragi would eventually resort to using more grandiose titles in English on his business cards because as US counterparts couldn't read his real title, which was printed in Japanese, so his real title would say assistant manager in Japanese, but he might have senior vice

president or something listed as his title in English. And I include this story simply because it points out a cultural divide between Japan and the United States, and it's one that a lot of people have to figure out how to work around and through whenever they're producing collaborative projects. And it's not you know, it's not an outlier. This is something that lots of companies deal with, but I

thought it was an interesting story. In the United States, the PlayStation would debut at the very first Electronic Entertainment Expo or E three, way back in nine at E three number one. Here in twenty the latest E three has been canceled, and there's a big question mark over the future of the the the event and whether or not it will make a return in twenty one, we don't know. But at three, the PlayStation made a huge impact, and it didn't hurt that it was up against some

some kind of shaky competition. You had the extreme misfire on Nintendo's part, for example, the much maligned Virtual Boy. So the buzz about the PlayStation was really powerful leading up to its launch in the United States, it already launched in Japan at that point. Now these days, we'd refer to that first PlayStation as being one of the consoles in the fifth generation of home video game consoles,

and a word on that. It's a bit tricky to apply terms like generation to video game consoles, largely because each company has its own release dates and some technologies overlapped between generations. But generally speaking, the generation designation tends to apply to the capabilities of the consoles. The first generation included dedicated game systems like the Odyssey, you know, stuff where you could play Pong, and it was hard coded on the hardware itself. In other words, you couldn't

play other games. It was literally the game that was coded onto the circuitry of the console. The second generation of video game consoles included slightly more sophisticated game systems like the at twenty. These are game systems that could accept things like cartridges, so you weren't stuck with that single title. You could actually switch that out by by

pulling the cartridge out and putting a different cartridge. In the original Nintendo Entertainment System, or the Famicom as it was known, in Japan would belong to the third generation of video game consoles that's also known as the eight bit era, and I talked about eight bit and sixteen bit uh in the last episode, the Super Nintendo and the consoles like the Turbographics sixteen and Sega Genesis. In other words, the sixteen bit systems were in the fourth generation.

And now that brings us up to the fifth generation where the PlayStation would belong, and that was the thirty two bit era. Other consoles that belonged to that same generation included the Nintendo sixty four and the Sega Saturn. Now. I mentioned at the end of the previous PlayStation episode that in North America and Particul Killer there was a

heavy emphasis on three D graphics. In general, the evolution into the era of three D graphics was one of the defining features for the fifth generation of video game consoles as a whole. Some systems, like the PlayStation were in better shape when it came to a three D graphics option. The CD ROM drive allowed game developers to make bigger, more complicated games than they could on Nintendo's

old cartridge based sixty four. Now, don't get me wrong, that does not necessarily mean that games were automatically better on one system versus the other. I owned both the PS one and an in sixty four, and in general I preferred the Nintendo console. But to be fair, I didn't own a ton of games on either system, so my experience was really limited. I did have some killer games on the n sixty four, like Golden I and some w c W and at the time old WWF

wrestling games. Also the extremely cheeky Conquer is Bad for day. Things like that and those won me over over the PlayStation. But again, I didn't have a lot of PlayStation titles, and I was definitely in the minority on this one. Now, let me be clear, the PlayStation has no shortage of great games. Far from it. It has an enormous game library, and that's thanks in large part to Sony's general practice of supporting a video game console even into the life

cycle of its successor. I'll talk more about that in this episode. So it's not unusual to find new game titles coming out for a console that is a generation behind the most current console on the market. But I'm getting ahead of myself. One interesting behind the scenes fact about the PlayStation is how Sony CEO norio Oga, decided to position it from a company standpoint, like what division

would it actually be produced under. He was worried that if the Sony Corporation was the sole producer of this, if it was under that label, then it wouldn't do very well because Sony wasn't known for video games, so he was worried that no one would pay attention. He actually designated it as a joint venture between the Sony Corporation that is the main brand, and Sony Music. I mean, I guess the thing did have a CD ROM drive so you could play music CD s on it, so

I suppose that's close enough. One huge advantage Sony had over Nintendo was because of Nintendo's stubborn insistence on sticking with that cartridge format. Well, cartridge based games loaded faster, and they were harder to pirate. They were also harder to produce, and they were a pain and that took us to make. In other words, if you were a developer. But developing a game for a CD ROM based system simplified things a lot, and so Sony attracted way more

third party developers to its platform. Nintendo was producing amazing first party and second party content, but found it more challenging to get third party companies to sign on. This also meant that the Sony PlayStation would serve as the foundation for some exclusive agreements between Sony and various video game developers, or at least specific franchises, and those franchises would help define the console's place in video game history. That place, by the way, is pretty high up there.

Oh and Sony also acquired a game developer company of its own. It was a game company called Psygnosis, which was mostly famous for a series of games called Lemmings, where you try and lead a group of limings across a dangerous environment, and you assign different abilities to lemmings in order to get as many of them across as possible. It's an adorable strategy game and I highly recommend you check it out if you've never played a Limmings game,

there's tons of them out there anyway. Psygnosis would become Sony Interactive Entertainment, which would become the internal video game developer division at Sony. Now the PlayStation would go on to become the top selling console from the fifth generation of consoles. It's sold more than three hundred thousand units in the first thirty days, with a nine scent sell through rate, meaning that Sony was selling nearly all of

its inventory in stock. In fact, for a while, it held the title as the top selling video game console of all time, and it was the first to hit one hundred million units sold, which isn't bad for a clandestine project that initially did not have the support of the company's board of directors. Kutaragi's ambition was not limited

to creating a video game console, though. He told Shuji Utsumi, one of the engineers who worked on the design of the PlayStation, that his ultimate goal was to create not just a video game system, but an entire operating system upon which all sorts of stuff could be built. So he saw the console as a type of specialized computer, and that developing for the console should be similar to

developing for other personal computers. He said he wanted the PlayStation to be more modeled after Microsoft's approach to business rather than Nintendo's or Sega's, And keep in mind Microsoft didn't have a console at this point, so he's really

talking about the productivity approach. One thing that Sony did and that a lot of companies do, was that they region locked video game consoles, So this means Sony would include some firmware in region specific models of the PlayStation, So a Japanese PlayStation console would have this coded into the firmware, and a United States console would have a different region code coded into its hardware, and that would mean that you could only play the games that were

produced and marketed for the region you were in, or for the region that the console was from, but not for other regions. So if you were in the US and you bought a US PlayStation, you couldn't just get a copy of a Japanese title and slap it into your con soul and have it work. The games were region locked, so you'd be forced to either wait for the company to eventually produce an American localized version of whatever game you wanted to play, which might not ever happen,

or give up. And this comes down to companies making bets on which games are going to work well within certain regions, and the prevailing philosophy is that due to cultural differences, some titles just will not appeal to certain audiences, so it's not worth the trouble to go through the development and localization to make a version for that region. Why do it if you're just gonna waste money. No one's going to play it anyway. That's the that's the philosophy.

And there are a lot of Japanese RPG or role playing games that fall into that category, and there is a healthy fan base for Japanese RPGs that are outside of Japan. A lot of people outside Japan love those games and so they find it very frustrating when these

games are region locked. Now, my manufacturers of cartridge based systems could use the physical connectors between a cartridge and a console to do this, so they can make consoles for one region, and the cartridges for that one region a specific size that will not fit into the consoles that are made for another region. So if you've got a Japanese cartridge for a US console, you wouldn't even be able to physically plug it in because they wouldn't

match up. So that was something that cartridge makers could do. But c d s are universal, right, they can fit into any CD player. There's thankfully not a huge variation in sizes and shapes of c d s. There's a little variation, but not much, so typically you can take any c D and put it into any CD player, but it won't necessarily work because of that region locking I was talking about. Sony solution was to create a

special pit. So if you if you were to take a c D and take a microscope and look at the surface of a c D, you would see the that surface, the surface that the laser actually reads, has a series of bumps and pits in it, and that's actually where the data is, you know, that's the representation of those zeros and ones, that digital information. And this was a special pit that was at a depth that

was beyond what a typical laser burner could do. So if you had a consumer grade c D burner, it would not be able to make a pit of this particular size on the c D. And that meant that you could encode things on CDs that could be picked up by specific region locked consoles, and it wouldn't allow things to play. So if you put a Japanese c D into an American console, the location of that pit would give away that it wasn't the right kind of c D for that console and it wouldn't play for you.

So it's a way of preventing people from playing. It was also kind of a copy protection approach. So they did make a small tactical error with this particular strategy, and by that I mean a huge tactical error. I'll explain more in a moment, but first let's take a quick break. So what was that error that Sony made. You know they had created this region locking copy protection system. It was reliant upon the pit on a c D and a special region locked key that's hard coded into

the consoles. Well, what Sony did was they included in the original PlayStation a pair of parallel input output ports and these reports that were meant to serve as a way to connect peripherals to the PlayStation. The idea being that further down the line, Sony might create something that would augment the PlayStation's abilities in some way, but you would have to connect it to the system somehow, and the way you would do it is through one of

these ports. Now, not a lot of official Sony peripherals were ever actually produced, but some were pitched like a v c D player. V c D s are video compression discs. You can think of them as sort of a predecessor to DVD s. They're essentially video c D s, but for you to store video on the c D really have to compress it or it has to be super short, because the CD has a limited amount of data it can hold, and video takes up a lot of data. So typically you end up with video that's

compressed so much that the quality is not exactly spectacular. Anyway, the only PlayStation ones that I know about that could actually support v c D playback were sold in Japan. I don't think there were any that were sold outside of Japan that had that capability, but I could be wrong. Anyway, third party companies looked at those parallel ports and they saw an opportunity. Some of those third party companies produced devices that players could plug into a PlayStation and those

devices would bypass region locking. So if you were in the United States and you got one of these devices, you could plug it into your PlayStation and then you could get a Japanese game, put it in your system, and you could play games from Japan. Uh those games would probably be in Japanese, there might not be any translation there. It might be a little bit of a language barrier, but you would sidestep the region locking you

would get access to those games. There were some companies that offered up versions of this hardware that were specifically meant to let you play pirated games on a PlayStation. So these were peripherals that got around copy protection and region locking. Later, Sony would revise the design of the PlayStation and remove the parallel ports, which forced gamers to go an extra step. So what people started doing at that point was they made these little micro chips that

are called mod chips. They essentially did the same thing as those plug in devices would do, but you know those plug in devices, you would just attach those to a parallel port. For a mod chip to work, you would have to open up your PlayStation, take out the circuit board inside the PlayStation, and then solder the mod ship to a specific location on that circuit board, thus potentially damaging your your PlayStation as a result, and then reinstall it and then it would work in a way

very similar to those plug ins. So if you knew what you were doing, you could get around this region locking and copy protection, but it wasn't for the faint at heart. Now, I'm not crazy about the concept of region locking in general, and I think, particularly in the age of streaming, it shouldn't be as big a deal as it is, although I also don't have to comb through licensing contracts that are a hundred pages long, so different regions of different agreements in place. It is very complicated.

In concept. It's simple technologically, it's simple to stream something to all different regions, but more on the procedure rural side, the legal side, it's way more complicated anyway. I don't care for copy protection that punishes legitimate customers either. So if people and Sony has been really bad about this in the past, if people or companies put in copy protection that makes it harder to enjoy the stuff you

legally purchased, that's bad. It actually encourages piracy because people will go an extra step to bypass the bad stuff in order to get to what they want, and then they essentially make it freely available for everyone else, or very frequently that happens. So this is not a black and white kind of topic. I'm not saying all copy

protection is good and all piracy is completely unjustified. I don't think piracy in most cases is justified, but every now and then you come across a case where it's really hard to argue against it, especially if you're talking about copy protection that could potentially be harmful. Sony had a CD based copy protection that ended up creating a backdoor vulnerability in a computer. If you were to put the CD into a PC, that for example, would be

a terrible, terrible thing to do. It was a terrible thing to do, and it's the sort of thing where I would say, yes, absolutely break that copy protection, because it's breaking your computer otherwise. Anyway, this meant that the original PlayStation would be the target of bootleggers of I P pirates and folks trading or buying games outside the

approved regions. Kudaragi denied that this was a big issue, even though it was undeniably happening, but that might have been because he was already thinking about the PlayStation two, which would take a slightly different approach to copy protection and eliminate some of the strategies that folks were using during the PlayStation one, So he was already looking ahead and not so much concerned with what was happening at

that moment. So one interesting thing about the mod chip culture is that it launched a sort of seesaw battle between companies like Sony and the mod or hacker Commune City. Sony would make a change to the PlayStation, cutting off options for maters. The mats would then refine their approach and try something new. So, for example, early mod chips, when you soldered them into a circuit board, they were always on, so if you powered the PlayStation, the mod

chip would also get power. But that gave Sony the chance to create some code that would do sort of a sweep and scan for the presence of mod chips, and if the system detected that there was a mod chip in place, then it would prevent the games from loading. So then the maters had to go in and build extra chips that would sort of put the mod chip

in stealth mode. It would deactivate it during the sweep and then reactivate it when the sweep was done, which sounds a lot to me like the system Volkswagen had in place for their diesel engine cars where it would turn off some of the the output of the engine whenever it was in an emissions testing mode, and it would go back into full blast once the emissions testing mode was over. It's very similar to that anyway. One other things Sony tried to do to fight piracy had

to do with the discs themselves. So if you take a PS one disc and you turn it over, so you're looking at the label at the first part, and you turn it over to look at the business side. You know, the side where the data is actually encoded. If it's an official PS one game disc, you'll see

that that side is black. And the thought was that if you, as a gamer, were to see a PlayStation one disc that wasn't black on the underside, you would know immediately that you were actually looking at a pirated copy. You weren't looking at an official game. You were looking at something that someone had illegally produced, and that you would perhaps no better than to go down that dark, dark road and thus consign yourself to a life of

video game crime. I guess. Secondly, there was a general belief that this black coding would foil pirates, and the assumption was that the average c D DREW drive would not be able to rip data off the black side of a disk, which might have been true for really early CD drives like the really old ones, but by the time the PlayStation came out, most drives were precise enough that that black coating did not present any kind of challenge. You could totally rip data off of a

Sony PlayStation disc. Big games on the original PlayStation included Spiro, The Dragon, Castlevania, Symphony of the Night, Silent Hill, Metal Gear Solid, That's a huge one, tomb Raider, Dead or Alive, Resideval, and Taken. Those were all big, big games with the

original PlayStation. In April n nearly three years after the PlayStation had debuted in Japan and two after it arrived in the United States, Sony would release the dual analog controller in North America and other Western markets, and this

was the first PlayStation controller to feature two thumbsticks. You still had the four directional buttons on one side of the controller, and you had the four action buttons on the opposite side of the controller, but in between those two and set a little below them, were two thumbsticks. So it was this controller that would actually turn me off of PlayStation for a really long time because I always felt that this particular controller was really awkward to hold.

It was just a little too cramped, too small, um so I felt that if I played any game for more than twenty minutes, my hands would just seize up. But the thumbsticks did add a lot of versatility to the PlayStation, and it opened up opportunities for developers to make new types of games to take advantage of those two thumbsticks. So, for example, you could have one thumbstick controller character while the second one controlled the camera angle.

Or you could use one to control movement and the other to control the direction of a firing weapon like Smash TV. Games like MEC Warrior launched with support for the dual analog controller and helped promote that peripheral. The version that appeared in Japan a few months later included an additional feature not found in the North American version,

which was vibration. That introduced the world to the first dual shock controller, and that gave the controller the ability to provide haptic feedback, that is, touch based feedback, and that's a feature game developers would use in lots of inventive ways. You want to indicate that a character in a game is anticipating danger when you send a vibration to the controller and now the player knows something's up.

Or you want to send feedback when a player's character is hit by something in the game, you just buzz that controller. Now, the duel Shock was not the first controller to feature vibration because Nintendo actually released the rumble pack for the IN sixty four controller in April of that year. That was the same month that the non vibrating version of the Sony controller launched in the United States. Now the U s would get the upgraded controller in n So why was there l A Well, it beats me.

I have no idea. I've seen a lot of guesses as to why, but not a definitive answer. So the guesses ranged between two general approaches. There are a few others, but these are the two big ones. One is, well, Sony needed to get a new controller out because third party manufacturers were coming up with their own controllers, and Sony wanted to make sure that they were the dominant player in that space, but they didn't have the vibration version ready when they were needing to get into the

market and compete against the third parties. A similar but slightly different approach, the second of the two arguments goes that the vibrating controllers were ready that Sony could have gone with that model, but it would have meant that the controllers would have been more expensive, and thus the third party versions that were on the market would undercut Sony, and so Sony would just waste money producing controllers no

one was buying either way. The United States didn't get the duel Shock vibrating controller until but once it did, that controller would make an enormous difference, and Sony would quietly discontinue the non vibrating dual analog version. And while the duel Shock would set a standard for PS controllers, it didn't necessarily mean every system would debut with a vibrating controller at launch. More on that in future episodes.

So Sony announced the new console, the PlayStation two, in nineteen nine, and they launched it in two thousand, but the company continued to produce the original PlayStation, or technically a redesign of it, called the PS one. It was a little smaller than the original console, but otherwise had the same features and capabilities as your standard PlayStation. In fact, Sony kept making the PS one consoles and publishing games for the PlayStation one all the way up until two

thousand six. Now that means that the original PlayStation had a lifespan of more than eleven years from the time it launched in Japan to the time that Sony discontinued production, which is pretty incredible. And it also set a precedent for Sony that the company tried to replicate later, and in two thousand eighteen, in a nod to the nostalgic gamers out there, Sony released the PS Classic, which is a console with twenty pre installed PlayStation one games on it.

It does not have an optical drive, so unlike the original PlayStation consoles, this one can't accept disks. You're limited to the games that have been hard coded and preloaded into the system. While Sony would focus a lot of attention on the PS two, the company continued to support the original console and it's enormous installed base of gamers for many years. But now it's time for us to

shift our story to the PlayStation two. Specifically, the PlayStation two console would be one of the big players, in fact, the biggest player in the sixth generation of video game consoles. This was what some would call the eight bit era of video game consoles. It's also the last time anyone would bother describing consoles in as you know, having a word size of a certain number of bits, because that

became less important. But this particular generation of consoles included not just the PlayStation two, but also the Sega Dreamcast, which launched a couple of years before the PlayStation two, and to this day it's still one of my favorite consoles of all time, but it pretty much fizzled in the marketplace. It also includes the Nintendo GameCube in that generation, which is one of my least favorite consoles I've ever owned, and Microsoft's first foray into the world of video game consoles.

The original Xbox was also in the sixth generation. The Dreamcast was the first one to hit shelves, and it did so in Japan in just one year after Sony introduced the dual shot controller and two full years before the PlayStation two would arrive. So you would think, Sega, you've got two full years to establish a gamer base, a loyal customer base of gamers. You've got the headstart

on Sony. Surely you couldn't fail. You'd be wrong. Kudaragi again headed up the design process for the sequel to the hottest selling video game console up to that point, and he was thinking about the PlayStation two pretty early on. Essentially during the launch of PlayStation one. He had ideas on how to prevent people from circumventing region locking and copy of protection. He had ideas about how the system should support more advanced features, and he had greater ambitions

as well. It was his hope to establish a type of technology that would be transferable to other Sony products. So, in other words, he wasn't content in just making the best selling game system in the world. He wanted to establish a framework upon which many different Sony products could stand. He wanted to make a sort of universal set of blueprints for basic functionality. I like to think of it as kind of the Apple approach with iOS, you know, iOS powers, not just the iPhone, but also the iPad

and as well as some other Apple products. I think that Kutaragi wanted to do the same thing and have the PlayStation console line sort of serve as the flagship for that. The PS two wouldn't quite reach that level of ambition, but it would become the top selling home console of all time, so I think that's a worthy accolade all by itself. One thing the PS two had

that gamers really liked was backwards compatibility. So if you had a PS two, you could play most PS one games on it in addition to all the PS two titles.

And this was another big reason why Sony would continue to support PS one development even after the law launch of the PlayStation two, because new PS one games could find a home either with gamers who had not yet upgraded to the new console or two gamers who had a PS two but they still like playing some of this stuff that was coming out for the older console.

They didn't have to switch between consoles in the meantime, right even if you had to play PlayStation one and a PlayStation two, but you just hook up the PlayStation two to your television because it can play nearly all the games of the PS one. Because there were a handful of PS one titles that did not work on the PS two, you know, like Mortal Kombat Trilogy or this was a really big one. Metal gear Solid didn't work on some models of the PS two. That was

a big blow. In addition, during the production span of the PS two, Sony actually made lots of different versions of the PlayStation two. A lot of them were indistinguishable externally, like you could put the two side by side and they would look identical, but inside they'd be slightly different. And some of the times those slight differences would mean that certain games would no longer run on that PS

two certain PS one games. So the question about whether or not you could play any particular PS one game on a PS two depended on two things. Was it one of the titles that just wasn't supported by PS two in general? And what model of PS two did you have, because it might end up being incompatible with

a specific PS one title. So it was a little complicated, but generally speaking, backwards compatibility was really popular and it was a lauded feature, and it's one of those things that when consoles don't support it, gamers complain because Sony kind of set this precedent, and gamers loved that. The PS two had a new CPU with an unusual name.

Sony called it the Emotion Engine, and the CPU included a single core processor, two vp us those are vector processing units for graphics, had a memory controller and an imaging processing unit or an image processing unit I should say, or an IPU in other words, and it also had a direct memory access component or d m a H. The architecture design meant that a properly optimized game for the PS two would have state of the art graphics.

Not keep in mind we're talking about state of the art circuit two thousand here, and that was pretty impressive. The chip ran at nearly three hundred mega hurts, which is ultra slow by today's standards, but at the time

it was pretty speedy. It had thirty two megabytes of RAM plus four megabytes of video memory, and unlike the original PlayStation, which was white plastic, this one was black and it featured a dual shock to controller, which refined the design of the previous generation's controller, and it became the real standard from that point forward. I have more to say about the PlayStation two in just a moment,

but first let's take another quick break. The PS two had a memory card expansion slot, It could support forty eight channels of audio, had to USB ports, It had a FireWire port. Do you guys remember a FireWire? You could use that to hook up an an additional drive, which was required for certain games. There was a Final Fantasy game that required an additional component or else you

just couldn't run it on a standard PS two. The PS two also included support for DVD playback, and DVDs had been developed between the time the PS one had come out and the launch of the PS two, so that gave the PS two the capability to serve as more than just a game console. It could act as more of an entertainment center, which would be greatly expanded

upon by future generations of the consoles. In fact, have become a real point of focus for the Xbox line later that would your tap some gamers who I remember a certain E three presentation where people were leaving an Xbox UH stage event saying why didn't they talk about games? It's a game system. But this was sort of the beginning of that move to becoming more than a video game console. Now, while the PS two had the new Emotion Engine CPU, it wasn't an enormous departure from the

PS one's operation. Both processors are risk processors r I s C. That stands for reduced instruction set computer, and this is where being a console can really pay off

from sort of an engineering perspective. So if you think about it a general purpose computer with a regular CPU, it has to be able to do everything pretty well, and that includes running all sorts of different software, and different software required different processes, So that means the processor itself has to be able to run a wide spectrum of instructions, but consoles are limited in what they have to do. They don't have to do everything, they just

have to do a subset of things really well. And games can come in all sorts of varieties, but the instructions all come from the same basic pool. So if you reduce the variety of instructions that you need to carry out, that means you narrow the scope of water processor has to do, and you simplify things. You rule out all the stuff that the processor is never going to have to handle, and then you optimize the processor to handle the stuff that matters a risk. Processor is

capable of multitasking simple instructions. So the combination of running programs that consist of simpler tasks as well as the ability to multitask means that these processors are really efficient. That translates to us into speed. There's some other technical stuff that we're going to get into, and this is where we get super nerdy. But don't worry, I'm going to explain some stuff that I think is is really cool.

It's also relevant p on the PlayStation. But um, this is why it gives me my opportunity to totally geek out. So the PS two has a floating point unit or FPU. What is that, Well, it's a special processor that handles specific types of complicated mathematic equations. Those usually involve non integers numbers that are after a decimal point, and these are called floating point operations because the decimal point can move or or float depending on the outcome of the calculation.

So the complexity of these numbers creates an enormous challenge for the main processor. If it has to handle all those calculations, it will get bogged down and other stuff will slow down as a result. So to kind of take the pain away for the main processor, you build a specific process or a floating point unit designed to handle those calculations. Now you've probably heard about flops in computing.

Now I'm talking about a type of operation. I'm not talking about flops like Microsoft Bob, though that was a heck of a flop. No flops in this case refer to the speed with which the FPU can process these calculations. It actually stands for floating point operations per second. A giga flop would be one billion of those. The PS two's FPU is a six point two giga flop FPU, so it can perform six point two billion floating point

operations in one second. The PS two has a component called the Graphics Synthesizer, which is in charge of stuff that includes and I love these terms, guys, strip yourselves in besier surfacing, alpha channel, UH, perspective correction, MIP mapping. I swear I didn't make any of these up here. I'll tell you what. I'll prove it. We'll go through these. So let's start with Besier surfacing. That's a three D modeling process, and the whole point of the process and

it breaks down, how many polygons? How many simple shapes do you need to create a three dimensional object within a game? Right? Think of something like I don't know a car. Well, the more smooth you want that car, the more individual tiny little polygons you're going to need to represent that car. And Besier servicing bases the number on the level of detail necessary to make the object appear to be smooth to the viewer, and that number

can change depending upon perspective. The PS two only performs these calculations on besier surfaced objects that are in the game, so not all objects are designated as besier surfaced objects, and perspective correction makes the texture map re size at the same rate as the object that has mapped that the texture map appears on. Texture maps are images like

and it's pretty much what it sounds like. Just think of a texture and then think of a peating that texture over and over and over across all the surfaces of an object in order to make it look like it's made out of whatever that stuff is, like wood or stone or I don't know. Dog. For the PS two has that alpha channel I mentioned, what's that, Well, that's to add transparency effects to an object, and it's a special graphics mode that's used by digital video animation

and video games. To make this happen, they use twenty four bits to define the amounts of red, green, and blue. Each of those get eight bits that are needed to create a specific color, and another eight bits are used to create a gray scale mask that acts as a separate layer for representing levels of object transparency. The degree of that transparency is completely determined by how dark the

gray in that alpha channel is. If you make an area of that mask dark gray, you can make an object appear to be very transparent, so it can be like a ghost. If you do light gray, you can create other sorts of effects like water effects or fog effects. What about mip mapping. This is the one that sounds the most fake, right, It kind of sounds like the noise that the those muppets make on Sesame Street. Mip mapping. Mip mapping that I lose you all guys, because it's

it's great, it's great character anyway. It's a form of texture mapping in which different sizes of each texture map are made. Does that mean Okay? So imagine you've got an image that represents a texture, right, it's a it's a picture of a cinder block very close up. So you've got that texture of a cinder block as a picture. Well, with mip mapping, you have different sizes of that texture image.

And it's so that when you get closer or further away from a virtual object in a game, the texture that you see will match the distance you're at, so it won't look weird like you won't have a close up view of that cinder block texture when the cinder block is really far away. But here's the problem. You can't make a texture map for every possible distance your character or your point of view will have from a

virtual object. That's just way too much, right, So if we were thinking in terms of feet, which doesn't really apply in the virtual world, but just stick with me. Let's say that you have texture maps that are equivalent to being three feet away, six ft away, or twelve feet away from the same object, and if you're further than twelve feet away, you don't see the texture because you're not you're not close enough to get that detail.

Your virtual character, let's say that they are nine feet away from this object, so they're in between two of those image sets, right, the six ft and the and the twelve feet. So what do you do well with admit mapping. What it does is it takes the values for six ft and it takes the values of twelve feet, runs a mathematic application in order to determine what size that texture map should be for nine feet, and then

displays it on the object. So that way, by having a few benchmarks, you can use those benchmarks to estimate the right size of that texture map for whatever virtual distance you are from that object. And it saves a lot of memory. You don't have to have, you know, an infinite number of different texture maps in order to represent objects. You know, realistically and it doesn't compromise too much on that realistic value, so that way things still look good in your game. It's a really clever way

of fixing that problem. And the goal is always to use the smallest texture map possible given the distance that the object is from the viewer, because the smaller the

texture map, the lower the processing load. So you have to have this balance between the size of the texture map versus the virtual distance of your character to the ob checked and also the effect you want to have because if you're on a close object, small texture maps create sort of a grainy surface that looks really bad, so you want to use larger texture maps when you're close. So there's a lot of things you have to take into consideration, and clearly that needs to happen all on

an automated side in the background. Now, one day we're gon we're done with the super technical stuff, by the way, so wake up, we're gonna get back into the story here. One day after launching the PS two in Japan, Sony sold nearly one million units. Now remember the PlayStation one sold three hundred thousand units in the first thirty days. The PS two sold nine hundred eighty thousand units one

day after launch in Japan. That's incredible. The new system costs the same as a DVD player around that time. It actually costs around two dars, which was the same price tag as the original PlayStation back in one launched at two. However, when we adjust for inflation, there is a difference. If we had just for inflation, it would mean that a brand new PS two bought with today's dollars, if it were the price the same as it was

back in two thousand, would cost about four d fifty bucks. Today, a PS one would be more expensive because it came out, So if we had just for inflation, that's about five

hundred dollars. Anyway, Since most DVD players cost around three hundred dollars or more in two thousand because they were relatively new technology, it meant that some consumers opted for a PS two over a standard DVD player because if they both cost the same amount, why would you not go and buy the one that also lets you play games on it, go and get a DVD player that can also play games. It makes sense. Sony had really positioned the PS two well, and it paid off big time.

Sales quickly outpaced Sega's Dreamcast system, which again faded away in two thousand one, which meant that for about half a year, Sony was the only company that had a sixth generation console on the market. The Dreamcast was gone, and the GameCube and the original Xbox wouldn't come around until late two thousand one, So for half of two thousand one, the PlayStation two was the only game console in town. Nintendo and Microsoft would be left fighting over

second place. Microsoft would squeak out a win over Nintendo, but even if you added the total number of sales of the Xbox to the total number of sales of the game Cube, you would just hit maybe a third of the total sales of the PS two. The PS two ultimately sold one hundred fifty five million units. It is the best selling home video game console so far.

Sony was able to get really aggressive with its pricing as well, because in two thousand two they dropped the price tag from two dollars to one dollars in an effort to compete more with the GameCube and to undercut the Xbox. Now, like the PS one, Sony would continue to support the PlayStation two for a really long time.

It launched in two thousand, and Sony would halt production in late two thousand twelve early two thousand thirteen, which is pretty phenomenal considering that the PS three came out in two thousand six. For like seven years, while the PS three was out, Sony was still making PS two's and still publishing PS two games. That's amazing. That would make the PS two the last of the major sixth

generation consoles to go out of production. The Dreamcast was first made rest in peace because it died in two thousand one. The game Cube followed, but lasted until two thousand seven. The original Xbox stayed in production until two thousand nine, and everyone else had moved on when Sony was still supporting PS two. Of course, it was simultaneously producing, promoting, and selling the PS three. But that's a console we're going to talk about in our next episode, and that

one's really interesting for both good and bad reasons. Something else will talk more about in our next episode will be online capabilities. So when Sony first launched the PS two, that console didn't really have any way to connect online, which is interesting because Sega's Dreamcast did have ports that lets you connect to the Internet if you wanted to,

but the PS two didn't have that. It wouldn't be until Microsoft unveiled the Xbox Live Online feature that Sony got really serious about online gaming, and that's when the company released an adapter that players could connect to a PS two in order to give it online capabilities. Kutaragi would take this into account when he was working on the design for the PS three, which technically he had been doing since the launch of the PS two or

maybe even before that. Like the PS one, Sony would release redesigns of the PS two, some with smaller and sleeker form factors. The company also saw some problems meeting demands, and not all of those were the fault of Sony's manufacturing processes. For example, in the Suez Canal, there was a Russian oil tanker that got stuck and it ended up blocking the passage of a Chinese freight ship that was carrying a vital supply of PS two units that

were bound for Britain. There are many British gamers who spent many a night wondering when the heck they'd be able to get their little mits on a PS two. Well, that wraps up this episode about the PlayStation two I'll have a little bit more to say about the PS two in our next episode, and then we'll move on to talk about the PlayStation three and it's innovative and somewhat difficult CPU system. Uh that had a lot of promise and also ended up causing a lot of headaches.

But I'll explain more about that in our next episode. If you guys have suggestions for a few your episodes of tech Stuff, get in touch with me. You can let me know on Twitter or Facebook. We use the handle tex stuff h s W at both and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.