The Birth of the PlayStation

on different equipment. Also means that there could be some background noises. You might hear my dog Tim bolt at some point, or maybe a train or something because I live near train tracks. I will try, if I notice, to stop speaking so that Tari super producer, can cut out anything particularly loud it or distracting, and we can just focus on the thing that has remained the most consistent throughout the entirety of this show. My low bar

for content quality. I'm kidding, of course, content is always most important for me, so let's get to it. So in December two thousand nineteen, the Sony PlayStation console turned twenty five years old, and this year that being, we anticipate the release of the latest in the line of

PlayStation's the PlayStation five. In fact, as I was going in to record this, the presentation about the PlayStation five was just starting to wrap up at what would have been the Game's Developer Conference or the Game Developers Conference. I pluralized the wrong word there, but that obviously did not actually happen in person because of fears of the

coronavirus and COVID nineteen, but they did it online. So I will talk about PlayStation five a little bit later, But first I wanted to talk about the history of the place station and how the platform has changed over the years, and how it's played a big role not just in the video game industry, but in tech in general. And we'll have a few opportunities to talk about some specific types of tech along the way to explain how

it works. So my guess is this is going to take a few episodes, and our story starts with the man credited for making the PlayStation a thing, a guy who is often referred to as the father of the PlayStation. Ken Kutaragi now Kudaragi was born in Tokyo, Japan, in nineteen fifty. His family owned a small printing business and Kudaragi was an adept student and became interested in mechanical systems early on. That was a curiosity that his family encouraged.

Kudaragi enjoyed building simple things like amplifiers, so you know, typical kids stuff. After he progressed through regular schooling, he enrolled in an electrical engineering program at Dinki Sushin University. And I'm sure I'm butchering these names, and I apologize for that. He graduated with a degree in electrical engineering in nineteen and upon graduation, he joined the Sony Corporation

as an engineer. According to Kutaragi, he applied to Sony specifically because the company had a reputation for giving engineers the resources needed to try new things and to be creative, which is something he really enjoyed. All Right, we're gonna skip ahead to the nineteen eighties. So at this point, Kutaragi has been working for the Sony Corporation for several years, and now he had a daughter who was into video

games on the Nintendo Entertainment system. Kutaragi watched his daughter playing games and figured that there just might be something to this whole video game business. And he saw the potential in what was then a niche industry. Now, at the time, the Sony Corporation didn't really have any plans for making video game consoles or video games in general. They were a hardware company and they weren't looking to

get into that industry. Nintendo began working on the successor to the Nintendo Entertainment System or in ne e S, also known as the Famicom in other places. Kutaragi would make a move that wasn't universally accepted. He made a deal with Nintendo to develop the sound chip for the Super in ne e S, also known as the SPC seven hundred. Now a word about this chip. It's a coprocessor, meaning it's similar to a CPU or GPU in some ways.

The SPC seven hundred is an eight bit chip, meaning it can handle a maximum word size of eight bits. Now that means that it can handle data that's of eight bits or smaller in size. A bit is a binary digit. That means it is a digit that can have a value of either zero or one. So this processor could handle a unit of data that was up to eight of those digits in a row. So you could have eight zeros, eight ones, or any combination of

eight of those those two digits. Modern processors can handle units that are thirty two or sixty four bits in size, and that might not sound like a big deal, but you have to remember that you can use just eight bits to represent the numbers zero to two hundred fifty five, so two hundred fifty six different values. With thirty two bits, you can represent more than four billion numbers. With sixty four bits, you can represent more than eighteen quintillion numbers.

So you see very quickly how a larger processor, a processor with a larger word size capability, can handle much more uh information at once, which in turn means that you can handle much more complicated processes. That's what it really boils down to for us from a user perspective. So an eight bit processor has a limit to the amount of information it can, you know, process. Those limitations

manifest themselves in different ways. So with a video game console, you're talking about the stuff like the quality of the graphics and the sound creating dedicated chips to handle certain processes can push back limitations a little bit because you're offloading those those rolls off the CPU and onto a coprocessor. But It can also add to some negative stuff, like they can add to the amount of heat being generated inside the device or how much cost it adds to

the final product. The goal is to get the most bang for your buck from a manufacturing side as well as from a consumer side. Now, the processor speed for this sound chip was one mega hurts. That means it could complete one million cycles per second. Hurts is a cycle, so a cycle really is sort of a step and instructions. All right, think about a task you might have to do,

and then break that task down into steps. Some tests are so simple they only have one step, right, So if the SPC seven hundred had instructions that all just required one step, then that chip would be able to carry out one million instructions per second. I'm oversimplifying a little bit here, but it's just to illustrate a point. But now we get to the tricky part. Some instructions

some tasks require more than one step. So you've got a million cycles per second, a million steps per second, but you might not be able to carry out one million tasks per second because some of those tasks will have additional steps. So, in the case of the SPC seven hundred, most of the instructions that was carrying out had an average of two steps, So really it was carrying out about half a million instructions per second, not a full million, because again each instruction on average required

two cycles. So what I just described can actually be applied to all sorts of processors, not just the SPC seven hundred. So if you've heard terms like the this computer's process sessors is three point four gigs. That means it's running at a clock speed of three point four giga hurts. That means it can do three point four billion cycles per second, So it can carry out three point four billion steps of instructions every second, but some of those instructions might be enormous in the number of

cycles it requires, so you know, your mileage varies. It all depends upon the complexity of what you're running, as well as the speed of the processor. If you've heard the term overclocking, which more typically applies to computers than consoles, that refers to the practice of removing some of the safeguards on processors so that they can operate at a higher clock speed than what they were originally rated for.

So maybe a computer manufacturer comes out with a processor that they say is rated for three point two giga hurts, but you overclock it so it runs at three point four giga hurts. So what you've done is you've removed some of those limitations. The processors gonna run faster, also hotter, and hopefully we'll be stable enough so that you get

extra performance out of it. Now, on a related note, some manufacturers actually build in specific limitations on their on their chips, not for safety purposes, but so that they can sell the exact same chip in different classes. Right, So they might have a a limiter on a chip that means it won't run faster than three giga hurts, and that same chip, but packaged in a different way, can run at three point two giga hurts, but the limitter has been adjusted. Uh. There are companies that do

this because it saves cash. It saves money on production. You just make the same chip a whole bunch of times, you put different limitters on them, and then you can sell them for different markets to maximize your profit. But it also means that if someone figures out how to remove those limitters, they can suddenly get a top of the line processor, but for a much lower cost because just bought one that had been had the brakes turned on, essentially,

But let's get back to the SPC seven hundred. That's a that's a discussion for a different time. So this music chip gave the Super Nintendo a lot more versatility when it came to the sounds that it could produce. It set the stage for a pretty fierce debate in gaming circles that pit the Super Nintendo against the Sega Genesis or the Sega Mega Drive. For the record, I don't care about this fight. I don't back one side

versus the other. I actually think both systems have their strengths and weaknesses, so if you program music that caters to the strengths of either one, you could make something really cool. So the Genesis wasn't great at all the things the Super Nintendo was great at, but then the same was true the other way. It all depended on

how you took advantage of the strengths. But back at Sony, Kutaragi's supervisors were none too pleased that they had an engineer who had taken the initiative to make this deal with Nintendo without their approval, and he was allegedly in danger of actually getting fired from Sony, but the CEO of the company, the CEO of Sony norio Oga, intervened and saved Kudaragi's job. He actually said, you know what,

I'm gonna let you finish this. This project and the chip was part of what set the Supernintendo apart from all the other consoles of that generation. Now, I wouldn't go so far as to say the sound chip is what sealed the deal as far as the Super Nintendo's success story goes, but it definitely played apart and the success meant that Kutaragi got a little bit more freedom to work on things he thought were interesting and potentially profitable.

Nintendo was really happy too, and with the SPC seven hundred setting the foundation, Sony and Nintendo began to explore a collaborative project related to the Supernintendo. Sony was pitching a CD peripheral for the Nintendo system and Nintendo was not super keen on this idea. See over at Nintendo, their business model for video game consoles revolved around cartridges, not disks. Video game cartridges are pretty interesting. A cartridge based video game has the game hard coded on the

cartridge itself. That is the circuitry of the cartridge is the game. When you insert a cartridge into a video game console, it connects the cartridges circuit board with a sort of motherboard like component in the video game console, and that connection allows you to actually have the code hard coded on the cartridge run on the computing equipment

inside the console. This approach has a couple of distinctions from stuff like CD ROM based games, and first is that a cartridge based game will load really quickly with a CD drive. A CD drive has a laser. The laser reads the data that's printed on the c D, but the laser actually first has to scan to the right location on a CD in order to read the relevant data. That slows things down to it because the laser actually has to move to the right location on

the disc. So typically with a c D game, the computer system or video game console will read the game information and store some of it into the system's memory. Then the player plays the game and is encountering stuff that's stored in the memory of the game system or the computer, and there's no delay because it's all right there in the random access memory or RAM of the console or computer. But when you get far enough that you're reaching the boundary of the stuff that was stored

in RAM. Then the system has to go back to the c D and look for new information. It's like, oh, well, I've I've exhausted all the information in this chapter of the book. I need to go to the next chapter. So at that point you typically would encounter a loading screen.

So if you've ever played a game where you're opening a door and then you get a loading screen, it's because you've gone as far as you can within the amount of memory of that system, and then you're about to move in to a new area and that needs to get loaded into the system's memory so that you can do that. Cartridge games, though, they send all that relevant information to a system much faster, so there's not really anly loading screens. The game feels much more responsive

as a result. From a business standpoint, cartridges have one big advantage over compact discs and that it's really hard to pirate a cartridge. If you have a computer with a couple of c D drives, you know you've got a CD burning drive, then you can potentially bootleg games. You could just take a legitimate c D read it and then copy it to as many blank CDs as you want using the burner. Companies typically include features that

make this harder to do. They have like piracy protection features, but typically it's only a matter of time before pirates figure out a way around copy protection systems. But with cartridges, you can't really do that because you have to manufacture the cartridge. You have to hard print the game onto

the circuitry of the cartridge. You could attempt to make a rom like a code copy of the cartridge, but then you also have to have an emulator that ends up copying the process of whatever system it was going to run on. It's it's a complicated thing, and most pirates can't really do it, so that's one big advantage. But CDs have their own distinct advantages, and a big one is that a CD can hold way more information

than a cartridge can. So cartridge had around the time of the Supernintendo had a maximum capacity of around two megabytes of memory. C d s can hold more than six hundred megabytes of information, so it might load a bit more slowly than a cartridge based game, but if you had a system with really good memory, then you've got the capacity to hold enough data for far more

sophisticated games. That sophistication might come out as more rich graphics, sound, more features, the ability to support some video that kind of stuff, stuff that cartridges really aren't do very well. And c d s are actually way cheaper to manufacture than cartridges. So you just start you know, you got the code, you just start printing them to c d s. You don't have to manufacture the circuit boards over and over again, so the process is simpler and you're less

likely to encounter manufacturing delays. So Sony, a company that had been one of the co inventors of the compact disc system, the other one being Phillips, pitched this peripheral to Nintendo, and at first Nintendo was sort of on board, you know, tentatively. Nintendo was feeling a pinch from its competitors for the first time since it had debuted the

original Nintendo And a quick backstory on that. When Nintendo was prepping its original Famicom Slash and Into No Entertainment System for launch, the home video game industry as a whole was in a downward spiral. It was around the time of the Great video game Crash of nine three. That's when you had a flood of crappy game systems, crappy games, some bone headed licensing deals that some other factors that all combined in a perfect storm to create

an unsustainable market for games. And the rise of personal computers at the same time complicated matters. So the industry came crashing down here in the United States and in other parts of the world, to a lesser extent in Japan. And when Nintendo was getting ready to debut the Nintendo Entertainment System in these markets, powerhouses that had once dominated the scene, companies like Atari and Coliko, were in a shambles. So for essentially a full generation of the video game

console systems, Nintendo reigned supreme and almost unopposed. But that was the eight bit era. The Super Nintendo was a sixteen bit system, and it wasn't alone. A company called NYC had come out with the Turbo Graphics sixteen and had even created a CD drive peripheral for that console. Is another cartridge based console, but ANBC had already come out with a CD based peripheral to add onto the

base system. This would be the first video game console to have a c D rome add on drive, and it debuted all the way back in nineteen eight in Japan. It also cost six hundred dollars, which was a princely sum for a video game peripheral. Even today, that's a lot. I mean, if you're talking about a VR system, it might be around that much, but usually you see peripherals that cost less than the base console system, not more.

And on the horizon was another CD drive peripheral for a different system, the Sega Genesis or the Mega Drive. They were coming out with a Sega c D peripheral and Nintendo was in danger being left behind, so they agreed to Sony's proposal. Kudaragi got to work on a CD drive that he called the play station to words, but in at least one other source, I saw references

to another name, and that name was Super Disc. Now that might have been something that Nintendo was using internally, but everywhere else you just see it called the play station. And I think you could see where the story is going, but there's a lot more crazy stuff to cover. So the deal between Sony and Nintendo was never made fully public, but there are some things we can glean from various interviews and articles, and one of those things is that

Sony had a really favorable deal. Chances are this isn't because of Sony's incredible negotiating power, but more because Nintendo executives were highly skeptical that a CD based system would actually sell. Nintendo wanted to make sure that the Super Nintendo could make substantive claims that it supported technologies similar to its competitors, but they were less concerned that those technologies actually sold in the market. So Sony was able to retain the rights to sell any software on the

CD based system for Nintendo. I mean, really, they had an exclusive deal. They would be the exclusive provider of

software that would run on this device. So really, what the spoils down to is that Sony would be making a plug in piece of hardware for the Supernintendo, and then Sony would be responsible for making the content that would run on that plug in and the Supernintendo would sort of act like an agnostic computer, not not that different from the way PCs do, and the deal would mean that Nintendo would take a portion of the revenue from the hardware sales, but Sony would get to keep

all the software revenue because it was the only one involved in that it was the company responsible for making it. And Nintendo had nothing to do with it, And if you're familiar with Nintendo, you might think, hey, that sounds kind of not like them, and you're right. But at the time, during the initial discussions, Sony reps were saying that the plan was to only make non gaming applications

for the CD drive peripheral. So you wouldn't be buying Sonic The Hedgehog on CD for the Supernintendo because Sony would not be making games for the machine. Instead, you would buy a CD that had an encyclopedia or something like that on it. The seed Drive would give the Supernintendo more capabilities, but gaming would not be among them. At least that was what the various parties agreed to verbally.

On paper, however, it would be a different story. I'll explain more in just a moment, but first let's take a quick break. Getting back to Nintendo and Sony, the contract that was drawn up between these two companies apparently didn't expressly forbid Sony from making video games for the CD drive. That was what everyone agreed to leading into the contract, but the contract itself kind of left that

stuff out. So legally, Sony could potentially have a way to make games, and that would have been a major win for Sony. See, Sony would be responsible for that hardware and would share revenue with Nintendo for that, but on the software side, the video game side, Sony would be the sole entity responsible for making those titles, wouldn't

have to share any money when Nintendo. Sony could potentially make CD based games for the Supernintendo and keep all the dough plus take advantage of all the advantages of a c D system. This would be an amazing opportunity. At the time, Sony had no presence in the video game industry. They could piggyback off the dominant position Nintendo was in, so they would benefit from Nintendo's reputation. Meanwhile, Sony would be making the sweet sweet cash from these

video games. Now, this is all dependent upon if the representatives from Sony decided that they wanted to obey the letter of the contract but not the spirit of the original agreement. And I'm not saying the folks that Sony were planning on making an ethically questionable move like that. There's no real indication that that was going on. There's it's it's possible, maybe even probable, but I don't have any proof of that. However, it must have occurred to

someone at Nintendo that this was a possibility. So Sony was in the middle of a massive transformation of its own right around this time. Again, this would be like the late nineteen eighties leading into the early nine nineties. For decades, Sony had only been in the hardware business, but starting in around n seven, they began to acquire media companies, music labels, movie studios, that sort of stuff, and it was emerging from this cocoon of being a

hardware caterpillar into a media giant butterfly. And beyond movies and music and stuff, Sony also created a new subsidiary in nineteen eighty nine called Sony image Soft. An image soft business was can you guess video games? So over in Nintendo. People are starting to get a little uneasy about this agreement as they thought about the possibilities further

down the road. So if Sony held up their end of the verbal contract, the worst thing that would happen is probably no one would go out and buy the peripheral because if you could only run stuff like encyclopedias, then who's going to bother spending all that extra money? Nintendo would still be able to say that they were keeping up with their competitors, and no one would really risk anything apart from the sunken cost of building the hardware.

But if Sony decided it was going to start making games for the Super Nintendo, that could cut into Nintendo's business. The company making the console might find out that had to compete against another company making games for the same system, and with the technical advantages of the CD system, that could be a strike against Nintendo itself. They could have created their own giant killer and public things seemed to

be progressing as planned. Heck, even after things would fall apart and spoiler alert, things are about to fall apart, there were still some articles that were published that said Sony and Nintendo were moving forward to develop this peripheral. Now. To be fair, this was also an era of hard copy blishing, so you don't have to go out and buy actual physical magazine or newspaper or whatever. See stories

typically had to be ready weeks in advance. But it does show that things fell apart relatively quickly, so we're up to nine now. In those days, the Consumer Electronics Show or c e S would hold two events each year. There's one in the winter in Las Vegas and one in the summer in Chicago. So this was in June of nineteen in Chicago, Illinois. And there's a story about how at a press conference at this c E S Nintendo representatives took the stage and announced the development of

a CD ROM based peripheral. There was just one small deviation from the one that everyone had heard about and that Kutaragi had been working on for a couple of years already. Nintendo was going to make this peripheral with Phillips, which was one of Sony's biggest competitors. Remember they were the co developer of c D WRONG technology back in

the early nineteen eighties with Sony. Now, this version of the story says that the Sony executives first learned about this switcheroo at that press conference that they were sitting in the audience and they hear this and they gasp because they've suddenly been told that the thing they've been working on is getting scrapped in favor of a product from a competitor. But as it turns out, that's not actually how it all went down. It's almost as bad,

but not quite that bad. Sony had actually known about this change for two whole days leading up to the press conference, and that's because there was a reporter for the Seattle Times who interviewed people from Nintendo, found out about this plan and wrote it about it in an article. Just you know, this is a piece of news that Nintendo is partnering with Phillips. So the Sony folks had

known about it for two days. They had even had their press event the day before, and at that press event they still announced the PlayStation, the Nintendo Sony co produced Aroduct And again that's two words, play station, not PlayStation, one word with the P ANDD s capitalized. And the idea was that Sony was going to go ahead and market a version of the Super Nintendo that had a

CD ROM drive attached to it. Meanwhile, Nintendo and Phillips would release their version of a Supernintendo that would include a CD ROM that in turn would have enhancements to the Super Nintendo's capabilities, and it was all really confusing. That version of the PlayStation never made it to market, but Sony did build prototypes of it. In fact, one collector was able to nab a working model at an auction years ago. The auction actually came out of a

company that had been filing for bankruptcy. There was a former Sony CEO who worked at that company, and apparently he had a play station prototype, a Sony Nintendo PlayStation prototype in his office. I think it most recently sold at auction for three hundred sixty thousand dollars, so I thought that it was expensive back then. Okay, but the story keeps going before we can get to the first

real PlayStation, and it even gets more crazy. So when last we left off, Nintendo announced it was working with Phillips to develop a CD ROM peripheral, and the scope of that project was actually larger than the Sony deal would have been. The Phillips periph role was supposed to boost the Super Nintendo computing power, so it's like you would get a Super Nintendo one point five with additional abilities and graphics and sound thanks to eight more megabytes

of RAM as a result. So that was a major difference between the two because the Sony system was just meant to play c D s. Meanwhile, folks at Sony and Nintendo were working to repair their relationship after this fallout. Nintendo must have been looking at the debut of the upcoming Sega c D with anxiety, so quietly Nintendo and Sony agreed to work together again. And now the Nintendo c D per for roll, the one that was working with Phillips, was also going to include Sony as another partner.

So now you've got Nintendo, Phillips, and Sony working together on this thing. In addition, Nintendo would be able to make money on Sony c D games sold on the system through a licensing agreement, so that work around got sewed up as well. The company has made the announcement one day before the Sega c D was to come out in the United States, which seemed like a pretty clear attempt to take some steam out of the engine of Sega and buy some time while the companies created

their own new product. Now, one person who was not really behind this whole effort was Kin Kudaragi, the guy who had been working on the original Sony Nintendo play station. While Kutaragi had pushed for the collaboration back at the beginning, Nintendo's decision to dump Sony for Phillips really rubbed him the wrong way. He didn't see it as just unjust.

He thought of it as unforgivable. He was ready to move on, and in fact he did, and he turned away from Nintendo and he looked toward another possible collaborator, and that would be Sega. Sega's Genesis or Mega Drive already had its own CD peripheral, the Sega c D. That's what Nintendo had been flipping out about. But Sega was also looking forward to the next generation of consoles and the goal was to develop a console that was

c D based from the get go. So this was sort of in the early stages of them thinking about the Sega Saturn, and this was not supposed to be a cartridge system with an additional CD drive. It was supposed to be c D dedicated. Sega was interested in collaborating with Sony in order to make this happen. Kim Kutaragi would lead the Sony side of things in early discussions, and on the Sega side you had the then head of Sega's hardware development division that would be the Headeki Sato.

He was also working on the concept. And after the fallout following the original Sony and Nintendo plan, the two parties decided it would be best if they didn't publicize the project. They want to keep it secret because if it doesn't pay off, then nobody loses face. Kutaragi was not terribly confident that it was going to work out, and he actually expressed his doubts very early on, and ultimately Sony made the decision to back out of the

agreement before it got too far along in the process. Meanwhile, as many Sony board members were wanting to hedge their bets and stick with a relationship with Nintendo because Nintendo was a proven success story in video games, Kutaragi was growing more and more convinced that Sony can make its

own video game console and leave everyone else behind. He felt that the smart move, both technologically and from a business perspective, was to stop trying to hitch a wagon to Nintendo's proverbial horses and for Sony to pioneer their own path. And while he held very little decision making power of his own, he was still on really good

terms with Sony's CEO, Norio Oga. Kutaragi had impressed Oga back in the s PC seven hundred project that was the sound system for the original Super Nintendo, and Oga must have felt that many of the company's board members were being too hesitant to jump into the industry wholeheartedly. Moreover, Kutaragi reportedly appealed to Oga's sense of pride. Kutaragi essentially said, Nintendo betrayed our company. Are you just gonna sit back

and let that happen? And Oga's response was, according to reports, pretty animated. He got head up about it, and he was enraged by Nintendo's actions. So while the board for Sony we're pushing for a collaboration, the CEO of Sony secretly gave Kutaragi the authority to develop Sony's own video game console. Meanwhile, Nintendo was making some design changes to the planned hardware that they were going to debut, this Super Nintendo with CD ROM drive. They kept changing things

and that was causing delays. And you can kind of think of this as a type of feature creep. That's when designers plan out a product, but then they say, hey, you know, it would be cool if this vacuum cleaner could also I don't know, brush your teeth or whatever. Then some poor team of engineers has to figure out how to actually make that work. And then they have to figure out how to make it work more cheaply so that the product can actually sell the price where

people are going to buy it. All of this takes time, and it makes you slip deadlines. With video game hardware, it gets trickier because as delays happened, other companies are still developing their technologies. They start to come out with more advanced consoles. So you might be working on something and then you think, oh, wouldn't it be cool if it also did this other thing. That sets you back as you try and make it do this other thing.

Suddenly someone else comes out with an even better console, and you're even further behind than you were before, and so by the time you actually debut your product, it's already obsolete. So then you have to go back to your drawing board, soup up your hardware, pushback production time further. And this happens in tech all the time, not just in the video game where world, but it does happen in the video game world a lot. In fact, that

it even happens on the software side. You might remember the saga of the video game Duke Nukem Forever, which was in development and vaporware for more than a decade, as the company behind it kept delaying the production of the game. As game engines got better and better, they kept saying, Oh, we can make it even better than it was, but meant having to start all over multiple times. Anyway, back to the Nintendo and Sony saga, the delays were the doom of the nes Sony Phillips c D system.

It never came out. Nintendo was already developing the next generation of its video game consoles that would be the Nintendo sixty four. The sixty four would outperform the old Super Nintendo. It just seemed like it was a losing proposition to try and boost an old piece of hardware beyond its lifespan. Now, there was no official acknowledgement regarding the cancelation of the project, but Nintendo effectively canceled it.

It kind of ghosted on the whole thing. I've never seen any verified reports that the company has actually produced any working prototypes of this proposed variation of the Superintendo. It turned out those uh Sony board members who were determined to play it safe, we're actually backing the wrong

horse all along. Now I say that with the benefit of hindsight, but back in the day, I probably would have thought that they were making the responsible call because Nintendo had a reputation and Sony had an unproven ability to make its own stand in the video game console market. All of that means that Ken Kutaragi's somewhat clandestine project to develop a stand alone Sony PlayStation console would end up being the winning strategy. I'll explain more in just

a moment, but first let's take another quick break. Kudaragi and his team went to work building out Sony's own video game console. They already had a good amount of

experience due to working on the Nintendo projects. They laid out what they wanted the console to be, and during the development process, Nintendo executives learned about what was going on at Sony, and they knew or suspected that at least some of the components the company was using to make its first game console were originally developed for the

scrapped Nintendo Sony Super Nintendo peripheral. So Nintendo tried to take legal action to stop Sony from developing the PlayStation because they were arguing the original bones for that system were made as part of a partnership deal with Nintendo, but ultimately the courts decided against Nintendo and found in

favor of Sony, so they got to go ahead. So despite the technical, legal, political, from an internal Sony perspective, and market challenges, the PlayStation team was actually able to build the gaming device they had in mind after years of struggle, and this was the Sony PlayStation, or as we refer to it today, the PS one. Of course, back then, we didn't call it the PS one because no one knew that there was ever going to be

a PS two. You don't call World War one world War one when it's happening, because that means you suspect there will be a World War two, and the optimist says, let's hope that doesn't happen. I mean, it happened, but we hoped it wouldn't happen. The first PlayStation had a thirty two bit CPU. Now remember a thirty two bit system isn't just twice as powerful as a sixteen bit system,

it's way more than that. So a sixteen bit number has two to the power of sixteen different possible values, right, because a bit can have one of two values, it's either zero or it's of one. And when you have sixteen of them together, that means you have two to the power of sixteen different combinations of those values. That actually means that a sixteen bit integer can store sixty

five thousand, three hundred fifty six distinct values. Remember eight bit was two hundred fifty five zero to two fifty five two ft six total sixteen is six fifty six. You go to thirty two bit has two to the power of thirty two different possible values, which means a thirty two bit integer can store more than four billion distinct values. So it's an enormous jump in power. The first PlayStation had sixteen megabits or if you prefer, you know, two megabytes of RAM. Remember a bite is eight bits,

so sixteen megabits of RAM or random access memory. That's the type of memory that the computer uses to store data for quick retrieval. So typically speaking, if your computer has more RAM, you can store more information in that memory and you get faster access out of it, and so to you, it seems like it translates into just faster response with your computer and it doesn't have to pull from the hard disc as frequently. The system also had eight megabits or one byte of v RAM that's

video RAM. I'm guessing you guys can figure out what v RAM is meant to do. It had its own g FX graphics processing unit. It supported twenty four channels of sound with its own dedicated four megabits of sound RAM with a sampling frequency of forty four point one. Killer hurts. I've talked about sampling frequencies on other episodes. I'd rather not jump off topic to talk about it right now, so I'm going to ignore this diversion, which is very unlike me and Soldier on. It could also

support up to four thousand sprites, not the drink. Sprites in computer graphics are two dimensional bit maps. Uh. They're very important, especially in the old arcade scene, and they integrate into larger scenes. You can kind of think of them as objects in this context. The PlayStation could create three D rendered graphics. In fact, it was intended to do so. Now those three D rendered graphics are fairly primitive by today's standards, but the PlayStation could also support

full ocean video. Guys, if you've never explored the world of full motion video or fm V games, you gotta do some searches on YouTube. The industry was more than a little puzzled about how they might be able to use live action video to enhance video games. The results range from interesting, maybe a little limited, but you can see where they were going and you can appreciate their creativity all the way down to the cringing lee hilarious. There's a Tim Curry Frankenstein game that is out of

this world as far as cringe goes. I love it so much. So there are many terrible performances in FMV games, and it is glorious anyway. These capabilities of the system set the PlayStation apart from stuff like Nintendo's sixty four system. One thing the original PlayStation didn't have was an internal storage drive. Now this was not unusual in early consoles. I mean in the old days, there was no way to say of your progress in a game at all. You would play until you ran out of time or

energy or patients or whatever. Maybe your mom told you to get off the video game system and turn off the TV. And then if you did turn off the system, everything would go away as far as the game is concerned. The next time you turn everything on, you would have to start over from the very beginning. There was no saving your progress. The PlayStation was no different. So if you did want to save your progress, you have to

invest in some memory cards. The memory cards were these plastic cards that you could slot into the game system. They had these little slots that were just above the two game controller reports on the front of the console. Each memory card could hold on eight whole kilobytes of data. That's um, that's not very much. Speaking of controllers, gamers are probably pretty familiar with the dual Shock controller, but that would actually come out later several years after the

PlayStation first day. You the duel Shock as stuff on it, like two thumbsticks, but the original PlayStation one controller did not have thumbsticks. It had four direction buttons up, down, left, and right, and then had the four round buttons designated with colorful shapes. There's the green triangle at the top, the red circle at the right, the blue x at the bottom, and the peak square on the left. And since I'm more of an Xbox gamer, I do own a PS four, but I play more games on the

Xbox and the PS four. Going from an Xbox controller to a PlayStation controller means that for the first half hour or so, I just keep hitting the wrong buttons. So that's a me problem. That's not a problem with the system. That's a problem with with me. Jonathan Kutaragi's team had the PlayStation ready to launch in Japan in December.

The company would wait almost a year before launching it in North America, and the company also aimed to launch the PlayStation one week after the project did launch date of the Sega Saturn console to takes some again some of the steam out of the engines of of Sega, and while the team was hard at work on the hardware, there was a question about the games themselves. At this stage, Sony did not have an internal video game development team for the PlayStation. They had a video game unit, but

that was focused more on computer games. At the time, Nintendo and Sega had several other companies. All had first party developers working for them, which meant their consoles were guaranteed to have launch titles ready to go. Now, there's not a guarantee on the quality of those launch titles, but some companies like Nintendo generally do pretty well with that. Sony was more dependent upon relationships with third party developers other companies that would make games to run on the system.

Some of that was actually pretty easy for Sony to do. Some of those relationships were easy to form, largely thanks to Nintendo. See, there were companies that were sort of jerked around when Nintendo changed policies about whether or not it was ever going to release a CD based system. For example, the famous video game developers Square, which was responsible and is responsible for the insanely popular Final Fantasy series, that was one of the companies that got kind of

burnt by Nintendo. They had dedicated resources to creating titles for a system that never saw the light of day, so they were receptive to Sony's pitch to make games for that system instead. Now, one monkey wrench in that particular approach came from inside Sony Computer Entertainment America or s c e A. This was a North American branch of the company that would oversee operations in sales in

North America. So the thought was that markets in North America and the market in say, Japan, are very different, and thus you need different strategies to make products a success in their respective regions. The general philosophy being certain games might sell really well in one place, but they're never gonna go over well in another. So games that could do incredibly well in Japan we're seen as being

completely unmarketable in the United States. Well, the head of s c e A at that time as PlayStation was getting ready to launch was a guy named Bernie Stoller, and Stoller had his own requirement as far as game development went for the PlayStation, so the PlayStation could run games with three D rendered graphics, which is obviously one D better than two D graphics, right, I mean, it's in the name. So Stiller put in place a policy

no North American games would feature two D graphics. All new games needed to be three D. This makes me think of there was a time at Disney when Pixar films were doing really well, where you had executives at Disney suggests that perhaps all Disney films should move to computer animation, that hand drawn animation was no longer popular. Uh, and at computer animation was just superior from a market standpoint.

It's kind of not really taking reality into account. So just as that wasn't true that hand drawn animation can have a place, it's the story that's really important, so is the same for video games. Three D is not inherently better than two D. It's also in the execution and what the gameplay is and the connection to the gamer, so that meant some games like Final Fantasy seven would not have a place in the North American market initially,

at least not as long as Stolen was in charge. Now, he did leave Sony about a year after the launch of the PlayStation in the United States, and then he went to work for Drumroll Please Sega as president and chief operating officer. He restructured the company, which was rough had about three people laid off as a result, and he was trying to prepare the company for the launch

of the Sega Dreamcast. Now you may have heard of the Dreamcast, but seeing as there's no Dreamcast five coming out this year, that pretty much tells you how everything went down. Let's get back to Sony. Even if a video game developer had not been burned by Nintendo, a lot of them were eager to try to create games

for the Sony PlayStation. That console was clearly more powerful and more capable than other systems that were currently on the market, and so Sony began to create partnerships with various developers, and they shared information about the PlayStation's design so the developers could optimize their code to run on a PlayStation. Once it was ready to go, Sony also

would send out developer versions of the console. So these were working models that weren't yet in the final consumer format, but they were designed so that game developers could test their games make sure that they actually ran on the hardware. The pre production work paid off, and the PlayStation would

launch with a decent library of titles right from the start. Now, the launch titles for the PS one in North America included games like Battle Arena to Shinden, which was one of the first, if not the actual first fighting game to have both three D rendered characters wielding weapons and capable of side stepping, meaning they could move deeper or

more shallower in the field of view. So typically in these sort of fighting games, you can move left or right across the screen, but you can't move closer to our further from the view of the person playing. Then there was ESPN Extreme Games, because this was in the nineties and back then everything had to be extreme. There was a first person shooter called Kiliak the DNA Imperative, which I had never even heard of until I did

the research for this episode. There was the incredibly popular NBA Jam Tournament edition There was a game called Ridge Racer, another popular game in that lineup. There was also a street fighter game in that lineup, although it was Fighter the movie addition, so you know, take that with a grain of salt. It also had Raymond that was another

launch title, and there were several others as well. After Stoller left, the PlayStation's library in North America began to include titles like Final Fantasy seven Thiss good thing too, because that title would become the second most popular PlayStation one title of all times, selling ten million units. The other big one was Grand Tarismo, a racing game. The console, already enjoying some early success, was on the road to

making it big. Now we'll continue our story of the PlayStation and the line of PlayStation consoles in our next episode. This one focused a lot on the prehistory of the console, but future episodes are going to look more closely at the consoles themselves, the game franchises that exist thanks to the PlayStation line, and the broader impact on culture and society.

If you guys have suggestions for a few sure episodes of tech stuff, whether it's a company uh specific technology, of personality in tech, maybe it's just a concept intact that you want to learn more about, let me know, send me a message. You can send it on Twitter or Facebook that My handle at both of those is text stuff HSW and I'll talk to you again really soon.

Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.