All language subtitles for From.Bedrooms.to.Billions.The.PlayStation.Revolution.2020

In many American homes,
there is a reasonable chance

that the video game Nintendo is hooked up
to the television set you're watching.

There were more nintendos
bought for children last Christmas

than any other gift.

Die, please die. Please die.

And one in every three Japanese homes
has Nintendo as well.

In some ways, Nintendo's history
is modern Japanese history.

For most of its 99-year history,

Nintendo made board games
and playing cards.

Traditional products
for a traditional way of life.

In Japan and America,
tradition has given way to craze.

Game preparation exercise!
One! Two!

Three! Four! Five!

Six! Wow!

Nintendo was very smart about it.

They dipped their toe in the market
in 1984, in New York,

just 10% of the country,

and established that there was a market
for quality gaming.

They started with
a very high-end little robot,

and they sold 100,000 in New York
in the first year.

Up. Down.

Right. Left.

And Nintendo, I think,
were the first company to appreciate

that they need to treat their consumers
as if they're selling them a toy,

that needs to bring people
pleasure and joy.

They worked very hard with the retailers

fo get the products stocked
and distributed in breadth and depth.

And the second thing is, they put
a huge amount of money behind Mario.

Super Mario brothers.

It was a Nintendo-dominated business.

And I was working at sega at the time,

and our market share
with the master system was 4%.

Nintendo had 94%

and there was some atari system
lingering on that had 2%.

And 4%, that's crazy.

That's mom going to the store

and buying a master system
rather than an nes

because she just doesn't know that
there are two types of systems out there.

Sega really took time to self-reflect,

and they wanted to understand
how they could better tackle the market.

They looked at where they succeeded,
where they failed,

and they kind of reinvented themselves
a little bit.

The reason, I think,

sega had any kind of chance at all
against Nintendo

was because they had amazing
software development divisions.

But their focus was arcade.

I think sega probably thought that
with the skills they have,

there was another market
they could take their games to.

We were going to try to leave Nintendo
with the younger kids

and position ourself
as the teen and college-age machine.

The Nintendo system's brain
is an 8-bit computer chip,

a technology rapidly becoming outmoded.

Nintendo has a more powerful 16-bit system
already hot in Japan,

but it won't arrive in the states
till late next year.

The 16-bit Genesis system by sega.
Genesis does it all.

"Sega does what nintendon't."

And so that was the famous phrase
that we had,

and we would show different visuals

of something that we could do
with sega Genesis

that Nintendo didn't do
with their 8-bit system.

And so, we were very much going
after Nintendo right from the beginning.

Sega's Genesis is Nintendo's Nemesis.

It's one of two 16-bit systems
that are already in the us.

Sega clearly hopes to leapfrog Nintendo
by touting 16-bit's advantages.

There was an element in
all their marketing, all their promotion,

their TV ads, their print ads,
where they went for style over substance,

and it almost made Nintendo look
a little bit dated.

Segal

sega's marketing campaign
absolutely resonated with me,

because being somebody
who was fairly tech-oriented

and interested in the advancement
of graphics, I wanted the best.

I wanted experiences that were going to
surprise me, were going to take me

beyond what I had been playing
for the last four or five years.

So they promised that you could get
the arcade experience,

not in the arcade, but in your home,
through the sega machines.

So when the market moved
from 8-bit to 16-bit...

With the introduction of
the mega drive/genesis,

super nintendo/super famicom devices
in the late '80s,

then we had a market
that was really taking off.

The graphics were becoming more realistic,

the games were becoming deeper
and more sophisticated,

and you had two companies
that were well financed,

that were taking each other on
in the marketplace.

So, when you have two fighting
head-to-head, the whole market grows.

And suddenly, games became a big
mass market entertainment proposition.

Although the games themselves
were still relatively simple

and appealed to
a relatively narrow demographic,

everybody knew what sega and Nintendo
was about.

At sega, we knew at some point

that cartridges
with a limited amount of memory,

or very expensive memory,

was going to have to give way
to optical media,

where you had much larger memory.

Interesting.

The encoded information on this disc
is read by a laser beam.

The problem was that cartridges
as a format

went up in increments of about eight Meg,

and there's only so much visual data
you can get on those

without the cartridge getting
more and more expensive for the consumer.

So, consequently, people felt

that if you're going to improve
the graphics or add the movies

that they felt everyone wanted,
you had to do it via streaming from a cd.

So, sega came in with this bolt-on
called the mega-cd.

And it basically allowed you
to play cd games

with your mega drive controller

and using the processing power
of the mega drive.

We were convinced that the audience
was going to want to enjoy

music, animation, full-motion video,

and now we had to develop games.

Sony had approached us.
They had a studio down in Santa Monica.

They wanted to work with us,

and they understood
that the future was going to be

with some kind of optical disc medium.

Sony had ventured into distribution
of game software

to line up with its distribution of

movie software and music software.

That was called
Sony electronic publishing.

It was set up under
Sony of north America,

who reported at the time
to Mickey schulhof

and the management of that,
Sony electronic publishing,

was assigned to olaf olafsson.

They not only built
a distribution network,

but they also built
some in-house game development capability.

Sony imagesoft made mostly horrific,

but sometimes really good,
but mostly terrible games

for other platforms
based on Sony properties.

More often than not, Sony pictures.

So, we did, like, Dracula sega cd,
which was horrible,

and last action hero,
and, like, cliffhanger.

And if you want to see
one of the ugliest games of all time,

look at cliffhanger for game boy.

It is just abysmally horrific
to look at and play.

Every now and then we would pump out
an amazing game

or publish an amazing game, like...

I thought hook was great,
from the movie.

We did a game called skyblazer,
equinox, solstice.

But more often than not,
they were terrible.

And so, we formed an alliance
where we would each fund six games,

and they would fund three
and we would fund three.

Or it might've been eight,
and we funded four and they funded four.

But it was something like that.

And so, that was the deal
we struck with Sony.

Don't you love the smell of the sewers
in the morning?

They smell like victory!

The trouble is that
the games that came with it

were largely just fmv exercises,

so you ended up with kriss kross:
Mix your own video,

which was where you used the controller
to edit together kriss kross videos.

And there was night trap,

where you flicked between a number
of security cameras

to save girls from these
bizarre kidnappers.

But the quality of the movies
was so grainy,

so, on the one hand, you've got
the relatively pristine graphics

of something like road rash,
but in order to get to road rash,

you then have to go to
some dreadful movie, which is,

you know, smeary and blurred,
and looks like an eighth-generation vhs.

Ken kutaragi had had an incredible career
inside of Sony up to this point.

He was very interested in sound processing
and signal processing,

and inventing new sound formats

that were powerful and possible
with new silicon technologies.

And that led to the collaboration
with Nintendo,

where Sony made the sound chip

that went into the super famicom
and the super Nintendo.

Through the partnership on the sound chip
for the super Nintendo,

Sony and Nintendo entered info a contract
to develop some new technology.

The first was going to be a disc drive
that Nintendo would sell,

which would be an add-on to
the super famicom/super Nintendo device.

And Sony would sell a combined console
and drive, all in the same machine,

that was called the Sony PlayStation.

So he was getting
more and more into console design,

and Ken could see that

putting console games on cds
was the way forward.

When they came to write up
the actual joint venture,

Sony said, "well, we'll make the disc

"and we'll charge the $8 royalty
and collect it,

"and, you know, we'll figure out
how to split that.

"And you can make the cartridges

"and then we can talk about
how we share the profits on that."

And Nintendo said, "wait a minute.
Stop the music.

"We make the tollbooths.

"You can make the discs,
but you're not making a tollbooth.

"We make the tollbooths.

"We'll sell the discs,
just like we sell the cartridges.

"We'll charge the $8,
whether they buy a disc or a cartridge."

Sony and Nintendo were uneasy bedfellows,
and I think that Nintendo's view

of what Sony's position was
in developing this thing for them

differed from what Sony probably hoped
was going to be a foot in the door.

Sony and Nintendo were working together

to come up with the new hardware,

but I think Sony was a little too greedy,

and tried to take over almost everything.

I think Nintendo realised
they were giving too much power to Sony

in the manufacturing of the discs
for the platform.

Sony had the right to license
other developers and publishers

to create games for the platform,

and that was the real heart
of the business model

between Sony and Nintendo.

I negotiated with mr ide,
the president of Sony,

and told him, "let's go different ways."

And in a surprise announcement at ces,

there was an announcement that Nintendo
would be joint-venturing with Philips

on the disc part of the device.

It was very embarrassing to Sony

to have a relationship that they thought
was going to be with Nintendo...

And they were kicked out
and replaced by Philips,

and that was the fuel that fired
the creation of the PlayStation business,

and ultimately,
possibly looked back on in history

as one of the biggest mistakes
Nintendo ever made,

'cause they made
a monster of a competitor.

I was still quite new, perhaps not even
a month had passed since my hiring

when the atmosphere felt very different
than usual as I arrived at work one day.

I thought that something must have
happened that would change everything

bring about the end of an era.

I asked what had happened, and was told
that we had been informed that

Nintendo had decided to go it alone.

Even when the joint project

with Nintendo was cancelled

kutaragi-San said that we at Sony

should make the system ourselves.

Something that kutaragi-San said then

something that influences me even now

is that we may not have
the greatest chance at success

but it's not like failing here would
cost us our lives or anything

so we should just go for it.

And so, when Ken put together his plan
for a new standalone console

that would be,
eventually, the PlayStation,

and he took that
to the then-president of Sony, norio ohga,

and said, "could I have your support
to make this happen?”

Ohga-San, who had obviously been
deeply embarrassed

by the relationship breakdown
with Nintendo,

said, "yes, you have whatever you need."

I joined the PlayStation team
in December 1992

it had been decided that we would build

a device producing superior 3D graphics.

Sony brought in engineers and researchers.

My main mission there, of course

was to make games
for this new PlayStation console

as I was there working on
the software team.

The entire PlayStation team
was really quite small

including the hardware team,
the software team, everyone

with various people
taking care of various tasks.

This was still a secret project.
It was a skunkworks, if you will.

It was called
computer entertainment project number one.

But that was 30 or 40 people in a building
on aoyama dori in Tokyo

that were starting to plan

what would become
both the company and the product.

The new generation.

New generation system,
new generation games,

and a new generation of value.

They're all part of the sega
generation for the '90s.

The sega generation begins
with the 16-bit technology of Genesis.

When we were looking for
the next generation after Genesis,

it was quite an interesting
and difficult challenge.

In terms of the saturn...

The head of development at sega of America
was a guy named Joe Miller,

and he was very concerned about
the chipset

that sega Japan was going to use
for the saturn.

He was concerned that
it wasn't quite good enough,

in terms of an advancement over 16-bit.

So, that was one part
of the saturn development.

Another part of the saturn development

was introducing
what was going on with saturn to Sony.

Sony, now, was our very strong partner
in developing third-party titles,

particularly, obviously,
those cd-rom titles.

And so, they wanted to be involved in

the development of
the next hardware system.

Well, this made sense to me.

Olaf olafsson was exec vp at Sony

and Mickey schulhof was president
of Sony America,

and there were some technical guys.

And we all thought this was
a pretty good idea,

to have a combined hardware system,
sony/sega or sega/sony,

because we all knew
we didn't make money on hardware.

Why not do a combined system
and make your money on software?

Well, I thought this was brilliant,

because we were certainly better
at developing software

than Sony was in those days,

whether you're talking about
sega of America

or sega Japan or sega Europe.

And so, this meant that
if we could have a hardware system

where we split the loss on the hardware

and each made profit
off of our own software,

brilliant for sega.

This had to be a win-win.

And so, I wanted very much to do this,

and interestingly, so did Sony of America.

When we explained it to nakayama-San,
he thought it was a terrible idea.

He did not want to do it.

He said, "Sony doesn't know anything
about the video game business.

"Why should we help them?
Let's not do this."

So, I was very disappointed,
and I wasn't happy about saturn as it was.

So, 3do was really the device that
announced that they were, in a big way,

going to start making
cd-rom-based video game machines.

There was another system
called the turboduo,

but it came out in Japan,
and it had a cd-rom player.

Now, it was the first time on a video game
I heard an actual audio score,

like an orchestra or like a band, right?

It was real music, not...

You know, not chip music,

but it was real recorded music
being played back.

And the fidelity of the graphics
was a little better.

So, the announcement of the 3do
meant the power was there,

and the capacity to store on a disc

was suddenly 600 megabytes, not 512k.

The 3do was a stepping stone.

I mean, it didn't quite have enough power
to create 3D games

but it was being billed as such.

It was, I have fo say,
a very difficult hardware to work with.

It wasn't based on triangles.
It was based on twisted squares.

I've never seen anything like that before
or since.

And the sales were just miserable as well.

Only sold, if I remember,
about one million units.

Most of which had to do with
the $700 price point for the console.

I mean, if you put that
in today's dollars, with inflation,

that's got to be close to $1,500.

The pitching was very... you know,
it was going to be the next big thing.

It really wasn't, and it was limited.

I think most of those,
either the cd-i or the Marty or the 3do,

were just a little bit ahead of reality.

All you had to do was have
a basic understanding of computing

to know that it would all be about
capacity of memory,

of how much you could fit on a disc,

and then the capacity and performance
of chips

to know how well
you could make things look or move

with that ability of the chips.

But I had lost faith in 3do, because,
really, it was an underpowered system.

And at that time...
So, this is in '92, "93...

I started to hear rumblings that Sony
was considering building their machine.

And that was a real
consumer electronics player, right?

Like, not just a video game company,
not a small coleco,

not a dedicated game company,
like sega or Nintendo,

but a big media and consumer electronics
powerhouse

was getting into the industry.

PlayStation came from
the word "work station"

a computer with a large screen

and multiple programs installed

so the user can do a variety of work.

Similarly, the PlayStation would

be able to play a variety of games.

We wanted to do not just games

but also work with
music and communications.

The name of the device became PlayStation.
Given these requests.

So, the original specification
for the PlayStation

was taking some real-time
3D chipset technology

that had been developed
in something called system g.

And system g was a real-time 3D toolset
for broadcast television,

for the kind of
rotating, spinning graphics

that you would see on sports programmes
or news programmes.

Live television, basically.

And that was a couple of engineers

who were really quite advanced
in thinking about real-time 3D,

and what that could mean in the home
got Ken very excited.

And then, marrying that

with Sony's obvious prowess
in cd and cd-rom technology.

And they also had an in-house experience

with building computers
based on mips processors,

so they were able to draw on
two or three different technologies.

Obviously, sound was a strong part
of Sony's background.

And they brought
all of those technologies together

into the one device.

The guts of the machine
was fairly off-the-shelf parts,

in terms of using a risc chip, 3000a,

and other components.

But the secret sauce was some of
the bespoke elements that we added.

So we had a special sound chip,

and with the graphics chip, the gpu,
we had special hardware to handle things

like geometry transforms. There was gte.

And also, some bespoke math as well.
Some special caches.

And on the cpu as well,
we had extra hardware support

for actually rendering
movies in real-time.

So streaming those
off the disc as well.

And the idea
that you could have a mips processor

in a home console...

Never mind in a workstation.
In a home console.

And on top of that, have 3D graphics
functionality and amazing audio...

It was nuts.

This was Sony's and PlayStation's
first entrance into the market.

And, of course, you had sega and Nintendo,
who were fantastic,

knew what they were doing as well.

And I think...
If you are going to enter a new market,

you have to do things differently.

We knew we needed the best creators
on the platform

to make the best games possible.

There was a need lo pursue

a positive, a proactive relationship
with third parties,

which in the world of Nintendo and sega
was seen as really a Thorn in their side.

You know, like mosquitoes,

that really just got in the way
of shelf space

that they could've had
for their super rock star developers,

their in-house people.

So, it was clear that

without some anchor, tentpole titles
from our first-party studios,

we had to rely totally on other people's
money, other people's support.

PlayStation seemed to have a hit list

of all the people they needed
to get on board,

in order to have a great launch here.

They spoke to everybody,
and they made sure

that there was no barrier to entry.

They went to konami, they went to namco,
they went to irem.

They went to all these companies
and they said,

"here's what we want to do.
We want you involved."

And after people dealing with Nintendo,
who could be quite tricksy,

this was a breath of fresh air.

The fact that namco was dominating
the arcade scenes at the time

meant there was
a huge, rich early portfolio

of tried and tested
video game experiences,

which were incredibly important to Sony

in terms of working towards trying to
adopt those onto the PlayStation.

I went along with them, meeting all these
developers and other employees

and my role there was to take notes
for everyone.

That was before everything.

When the PlayStation had just
got its start as a business

these meetings were very important
for Sony.

I think that my name is probably
on each set of notes there.

That was another one of my jobs then.

And they talked about the technology
that they would want,

they would talk about the business model
that they want.

And we quite quickly evolved this mantra

that if we as a platform can be
the creative choice of the developers

and the commercial choice
of the publishers,

then we have a chance of success.

And we got feedback
from a number of the companies saying,

"if you get to a million units,
then we will support you."

And I think that was set as a target

that was impossible in their mind
for Sony to achieve.

And so, we promised that we would do
a million units in Japan.

And then we had some other conversations
that were much more mundane,

but, actually,
possibly even more impactful.

In the graphics chip
of the PlayStation one

is a unique graphics mode.

And the only reason
that graphics mode is there

is to allow capcom to more easily port
their arcade games to the PlayStation.

Sega and Nintendo had a decade or more

fo develop
an in-house development capability.

Sony had very little.

Just a little bit
from electronic publishing,

some from psygnosis,
and one or two in Japan.

The rationale
behind the acquisition of psygnosis

was that Sony imagesoft in the us

was looking for
more and more development talent

for its games.

Psygnosis had developed
some really clever technology

to do with streaming of data and video
from cd-roms,

initially working on devices
like the fm towns in Japan,

but then also on sega cd,

which Sony was a big supporter of,

because it used
our cd manufacturing capabilities.

And so, psygnosis was eventually acquired
by the us division of Sony

in the early part of 1993,

and then they were
one of the early developers

who were helping to create games
at the beginning of PlayStation.

And Sony, actually, at the time,
didn't do acquisitions.

I think we were about
their eighth acquisition lifetime.

We were sold to by olaf olafsson
and Mickey schulhof,

who clearly had a passion to innovate.

We didn't know why they had
this passion to innovate at the time.

Anyway, the transaction completed.

A couple of weeks later,
we're on a plane to Tokyo,

and we're introduced to this...

I can only describe it as
a busted photocopier.

A huge cabinet with chips and wires
hanging out of it,

bit of a controller,
and the famous dinosaur's head.

So, we looked at
this strange piece of hardware,

and, of course, it lit up for me.

We just couldn't wait
to get our hands on this thing.

And it became very clear early on
that it was slightly ill-conceived

for mass-market development
and deployment

into the development community.

And also the hardware itself
was a bit odd in some ways,

because it had really been designed as
using the cd like a pseudo cartridge.

So, you put the cd in, you load the game,

you take the cd out.

That wasn't where we thought
that piece of hardware should go.

So, we recommended up-spec'ing the cd.

More memory.

Which was well-received by the engineers
in Japan, I have to say.

Ken kutaragi, in particular.

So the PlayStation started to take shape.

Ian would always come in
and say excited things, like, you know,

he's seen amazing technology
at some meeting

or some conference or whatever.

But I remember everyone getting
very excited about

the delivery of this new item.

And it was huge,

and it was covered in fans,
just strapped to it.

And it made a hell of a noise
when you fired it up.

And it was the very first Dev kit
of the PlayStation.

So, they did their homework.

It wasn't just that they knew
what kind of machine needed to be built.

It wasn't just that they knew what kind
of services they needed to provide.

They knew which partners
they needed to target.

And that's the hardest thing of all.
And they nailed it.

Our approach was to be as open as we could

to be hands-on, to go and visit them,
to create developer conferences...

And really act in a way
that maybe hadn't been seen before,

in terms of actually
helping developers understand

what we wanted to do,
and helping them to get there as well.

I was inspired by what I had experienced
at the 3do developers' conference

in San Francisco, or near San Francisco,
in late 1992.

And what I saw was, for the first time,

they were treating the creators
like rock stars.

And they realised that
the creative community

was more important than
talking to the execs of the publishers.

And we took the same model,
we expanded upon it,

and we focused a lot of our efforts
on making great developer tools,

and making the developer experience
the best that it could be,

because we know that creative people
have a choice.

They can choose what platforms to work on,

and they can choose which platforms
to put their best people on.

And we knew that if we could make
working on PlayStation a great experience,

we would get the best people,
and the best people make the best games.

Sony was going around talking to
the capcoms and the konamis of the world.

I believe we were lumped into
that group of meetings,

and in that,
someone came to the Sony music offices,

where we were working at Sony imagesoft,

from Sony and said, "here's this vhs tape.

"This is what PlayStation is and this is
what Sony's going to be making,

"and you guys are now going to be putting
all your stuff on PlayStation."

And that tape was wild.

Jurassic park was huge at the time.
Everybody talked about the dinosaur,

and when you actually saw it
in real-time in 3D,

for the time, you were like,
"holy cow, this is amazing.”

Sony gave us this demonstration
of a dinosaur. It was a t-Rex head.

And they told us how it would move around
in real-time cg.

Of course, we were making games
at the time, but we were also film fans,

and the cg in Jurassic park
had made a huge impact.

To see the same kind of visual depictions
from Jurassic park,

actually moving around
in Sony's tyrannosaurus demo,

on this platform called PlayStation.

That left a very lasting impression on us.

As a viewer of the tape, we're envisioning

"it's going to be that dinosaur
fighting a pterodactyl,

"and there's going to be
beautiful waterfalls in lush jungles,”

and it's like, "well, actually,
everything the PlayStation can do

"is just to make that dinosaur
against a black background.

"It can't do anything else.

"But we want to at least show you
that we can do this cool dinosaur."

But then it went on
to show you actual games,

either in development
or proof of concepts.

And it showed jumping flash!

And that was the first time
I'd ever actually thought

that you could break the bounds of that,
really, at the point,

getting very tired, stale, 2d, side-scroll
way of expressing a game,

and suddenly you have
this massive verticality

and this robot rabbit is jumping

what seemed to be
thousands of feet in the air.

And there was a jrpg
ahd it looked like a hand-drawn cartoon.

And when they went into battle sequences,

it was like you were watching
an anime sequence

of like, camera cuts
ahd beautiful effects.

That was what got me excited enough
to say,

“this industry's
about to get super exciting,

"because it feels now
like you can express games

"in a much more dynamic and exciting
and cinematic way,"

that really, before I knew much about
pure game design,

just at a surface level, it was like,
"that is so crazy exciting,"

that this tape is basically saying to us,

"hey, game creators,
we are about to allow players

"to literally step into these worlds."

How many colours you could use

was always a question then.

Moving into an era

where you could use all these colours

as well as polygons and textures

really was like a dream to me.

If felt that if I could do all that

then I could make the 3D metal gear

that I had wanted to

since the days of the msx
but was unable to.

Though changing the colouring
was a scary idea.

When I saw the PlayStation presentation

I saw that I would be able

to make the game that I really wanted

with a full set of colours and polygons.

That idea was really shocking to me.

I mean in a positive sense of the word.

When I heard that Sony,

a company known for audio
and electronics equipment,

was making a game console,

I was both excited and anxious to see
what they would come up with.

Then when I saw this machine

with its cd-rom drive,

and the 3D polygon visuals,

it was a completely different approach
to what had come before

and revolutionised the industry.

I think if Sony had not entered
the console market at that time

then it would be totally different today.

When I saw what they came up with,

with the cd-roms and the polygons,

it felt like a brand new approach
to games.

You just wanted everybody to say,

"I want to be part of this project
because it is the future."

And I think 99%-plus people bought in
on that basis.

You didn't have to sell it to them

and they didn't feel like
they were taking a risk.

Three, two, one. Go!

What a start!

This is just what I wanted to see.

Working on the magazines, we used to
get things like login and famitsu,

and I remember the first time
the Ridge racer screenshots appeared.

And you knew then it was a game-changer.

You knew then that this was
a proper 3D console.

This was something that...

It wasn't faking 3D, like the fx chip
on the super Nintendo or mode 7.

There was a camera
that was panning around things.

The cars in Ridge racer
were going past you,

and it wasn't a 2d sprite.

And it was... it just blew you away.
It was incredible.

Yes, I remember at the time,

being asked to demo a sample

to various development companies.

This was met with
some shock and awe.

Reactions such as,
'wow, they can really do this...'

I was aware at the time
that other companies

had studied the demo really closely.

I think that it was a massive success,
as a sample.

We learned what we can do with hard work.

We needed to make better games,
and so did namco.

I think that this was a great development.

The initial sdk was certainly quite large

around this size, and it was heavy too.

Sony sent it to the game companies
in march of 1993.

A number of game companies said

that they wouldn't be able

to make games for the PlayStation

if Sony didn't have the sdk out

by the final day of march.

And so it wound up

that the final day of march
was our due date.

I remember us completing
and delivering it.

The machines were handmade

and we couldn't send them

via a home delivery service

due to their weight, size

and large power source.

This meant that
we delivered them ourselves

taking taxis and bullet trains to do so.

3 or 4 of those were around 30 kg

but we brought them to the game companies.

There were actually some people

that flew all the way to the us with them.

It was quite clear
that people were excited about it,

and there were a lot of loose lips
as people started getting the hardware.

And psygnosis, for example,
were very vocal on what it could do.

And everyone just
started talking about 3D.

You know,
previously 3D had been pseudo 3D.

But all of a sudden, you know,
you had people who were talking about

the possibilities that were afforded by
this new hardware

where 3D was incredibly easy,
comparatively, to what had gone before.

So, yeah, 3D was a huge, huge part of it.

And it wasn't like, you know,

when you used to get things like
f-18 interceptor and stuff like that,

and it would be a jerky plane
made out of about 15 polygons.

No, you were talking about platform games
that were made out of 3D items,

and it was just revolutionary,
really strong.

It drew triangles for you.

Whereas prior to that, every other 3D game
that had come out on any platform

that had tried to draw a triangle
and fill it in with a texture

had had to do that in software.

So the cpu is sat there, going, "right,

"there's a red dot there,
a blue dot there, blah, blah, blah."

Suddenly with the PlayStation,
you just go,

"here's the three corners of my triangle,
here's my texture, draw it."

Bang, and it's on screen, perfect for you,
projected into 3D.

You know, it's like, that's taken
so much of the difficulty away

and allowing you to do something
you've not been allowed to do before.

In our first work

to try and help developers succeed
on PlayStation,

the main problem, I think,
we were teams who were new to 3D,

and who'd already been working
maybe on 2d titles for years,

but PlayStation was maybe the first leap
into this new era.

And you needed a good grasp of math

fo cope with vectors
ahd matrices transformations.

Quaternions,
and otherwise exciting things...

And if you didn't have the basic math
to do that kind of stuff,

you couldn't code in 3D any more.

So, it was quite a step change.

A lot of our peer group just went away
from the games industry,

at that transition from 2d to 3D.

Working with 3D changes everything.

Just to give an example,

in the 2d world, what you could see
of the world was restricted.

It was just what was within
the boundaries of the TV set.

With a 3D world, with perspective,

you can see everything
that's in the distance.

And so, I remember going to a trade show,

and the poor team that was making a game

hadn't realised that this was
a fundamental rule of 3D.

You had to restrict what was visible.

And so they had a long, long canyon
that ran at a few frames a second,

because they were trying to display
the whole thing.

And as you'd walk down the canyon,

the frame rate would get
better and better and better

until it would be at interactive rates

when you were at the very end of it
and couldn't see anything.

And this was just the basics.

We had to learn to make worlds
with lots of crooked geometry in them,

so that these views to infinity
didn't occur.

It's like suddenly being offered
a whole new medium to create stuff in.

For many people
that's actually completely unnerving.

And that's really
how I remember that transition.

I remember actually being very excited
about creating artificial worlds

in a different way
than the pixel-bashing days of yore.

I think it ultimately comes down
to the fact that we live in a 3D world,

so that's what we're used to.

There are things in the distance,
we go and explore, we look around.

It's what kids do. You run around,
you explore, you find hiding places,

- play hide and seek...
- You make dens, you climb trees.

All those sorts of things. And that was
a chance for us to do that in games.

You know, you've got to remember that,
perhaps from a programmer's point of view,

going into the 3D world
would've been a difficult transfer,

but for an artist,
it was probably the opposite.

Because we always wanted to push
what we could do.

We always wanted more,

we always wanted to display more,

we wanted to make things
more visually elaborate.

We wanted a 3D environment.

So, in some respects, from the early days,
right up until tomb raider,

there were more constraints
if anything else.

Our world was opening up.

It got easier for us to develop.

Our ideas would...

We could put those concepts onto screen,
and a lot easier,

the more that the software developed
through the years.

There was the technical aspects of the 3D,
which were brutal.

But even worse
was how it works with the gameplay.

Because, essentially,
if you think of what's going on

in a classic 2d character action game
like donkey Kong country,

is you've got a character moving
one or two-dimensionally,

like, on the screen,

and then they're doing
timing-related things,

like jump, jump, jump, spin,

you know, kick, or whatever.

Jump, jump, leap on the thing,
ride the thing over, jump.

And it's all about the constraint.

Because of the 2d-ness, it's very easy
to make it so that your only choices

were to either, like, jump on that barrel
or fall in the pit.

Or jump on the barrel or ride on that
moving platform, or fall in the pit.

In 3D, it turns out,
because of the extra dimension,

there are several huge problems.

There's basically the fact that,

okay, you are in a field
and there's a monster running towards you,

and nothing really prevents you
from just running around it.

That can't really happen in 2d,

because that "around" is the dimension
that's in and out of the screen

that you don't get in the 2d game.

But in the 3D game,
you're looking at it the other way

and it's the left-right dimension,
but it's the extra dimension.

It doesn't matter which way it is.

It's just the extra dimension.
It gives you too much degrees of freedom.

So you've got that problem,
you've got the camera problem,

which makes judging the jumps
and the timing

much, much more difficult
depending on what the point of view is.

And the point of view is not so set.

On the 2d one,
there's only one logical point of view,

which is perpendicular to...

In the third dimension
that you're not actually using.

In the 3D game,

the camera is in the same three dimensions
as the actual game.

And where is it? Is it behind
the character, the side of the character,

is it changing, is it moving?

What happens if you start to curve
and go sideways?

And there was no example
of how to handle this.

And so we had to figure it all out.

Capcom had only very recently
started using 3D graphics

so we began our work by first thinking

about how we could go about using them.

Our benchmark was that t-Rex demo
that Sony came out with.

We took quite a number of approaches

from working as hard as we could to
replicate what they had put out

to thinking that it would actually be
a bad move

to approach resident evil
like they did t-Rex.

We really were starting from zero there.

It just wouldn't display

so the idea of going full 3D

just wasn't going to get much traction.

With things going like this

it started feeling like
it could get cancelled.

When alone in the dark came out

it had a large quantity

of pre-rendered graphics displayed.

The only object was the character itself.

From the player perspective

the game had
a three-dimensional atmosphere

and all of this demonstrated

that it was now possible

to create a more complete game

including visually.

From there, we steadily moved
onto animation methods.

By deciding to use camerawork
to show a 3D space in 2d,

mikami-San established the blueprint
for what would become resident evil.

That door.

But Chris is...

Essentially, the idea was

that there would be zombies

that were located in places

that the camera didn't reach.

The player couldn't see them

but they could hear them.

There was a certain scariness

in zombies being out of sight.

This type of fear was sort of

the main concept for the game.

I imagined the player

growing very jumpy about everything

and being on the edge of their seat.

Where they would be able to sense

that there was a zombie

just around the corner.

The camera marks...

Well, I did set the cameras,

but I didn't have any experience
shooting with a real camera.

I started learning from step one,

imagining how a player going
through a corridor would feel,

which camera angles would frighten them.

That's how I went about it.

If we get down to the technical details,

a single room could only have 8 cameras...

You really remember this well!

Due to reasons of memory capacity.

This doubled to 16 for resident evil 2.

There were just 8 for the first game.

You only had so many cuts

and you had to make the game playable,

without leaving any blind spots in the
room where the character can't be seen.

First time I ever saw resident evil,
the guy from virgin brought in a disc,

and he went, "just have a look at this."
He didn't say anything else.

And we were all watching it,

and you get that bit
where the first zombie turns around

and you go, "yeah, brilliant."

And then, all of a sudden,
you're walking along a hallway

and the dog jumps through the window.

And two of my team lef,

and then one of them came back

just as the spider
fell from the ceiling,

and immediately turned
and walked out again.

It was one of the most exciting games
that I knew was coming out.

It was one that really, really
blew me away.

This is rupturefarms.

They say it's the biggest
meat processing plant on oddworld.

I wasn't really interested in games
at all, in making them.

The idea never occurred to me.

And it still didn't occur to me until
I was in the film business for a while,

and I was looking at how do I take
my desire to create virtual worlds,

meaning fantasy worlds
or worlds of the imagination,

and convert that
using 3D computer graphics

into stories I want to tell,
into characters that I'd like to develop,

and into money I'd like to make.

And that's what transitioned
my brief history,

let's say seven years
of computer animation traditionally,

into wanting to start
a video game company.

Now, I hadn't seen a PlayStation yet,
but it gave me the faith to say,

"okay, this stuff is getting real,

"and I understand Hollywood enough,
I believe,

"to understand what I think
is going to happen with video games."

And that really gave me
the inertia to say,

"if we don't do it now,
we're not going to be able to later."

And so, that was '90...

'92, I started convincing Sherry McKenna

we need to start a game company.

Lorne comes to my house
in the Hollywood Hills,

and we're sitting by the pool
because I'm...

Hollywood

and, lorne says, "you know,
I've got this just really great idea.”

And I go, "okay, tell me what it is,"
'cause I love stories.

So he tells me this awesome idea.

I'm telling you, it was such a great idea.

And it was just like a reflection
of what was going wrong with the world.

The glukkons were scared,
'cause profits were grim.

And I went, "man, this is so awesome.
We could make five movies!"

And he goes, "yeah, no,
we're going to do five games."

And I went, "games? What are games?”

He goes, "you know, video games?”
and I went, "no, I don't know."

And then I saw the PlayStation.

And I thought, "I don't know.
Maybe we can do...

"Maybe we could do really good
computer graphics for video games."

When some big face appeared
and said I was dead.

Said our land was changing,

was imbalanced at best.

He told me my fate was fo rescue the rest.

When we actually started the production
of the game,

we had two types of people.

We had people that had come with us
from Hollywood,

and then we had people that were acquired
through the game industry.

And with Sherry,

I would tell her the stories
and we would talk about it,

and at a certain point, she had said,

"well, it's really... in games today,
aggression equals rewards.

"And what you're talking about, lorne,
is really empathy can equal rewards."

And I was like, "that's it!
That's the Mark.

"And I think if we can do that,

"then we can bring
a wider audience to gaming

“and still have the challenging aspects
that make gaming great.

"But we can bring a bit more
of the epic storytelling to it.

"And a bit more
of Hollywood production design,

"and Hollywood animation values."

I'm telling a story.

Oddworld's games
are going to be about a story,

and the vehicle that we're going fo use
to tell that story

is going to be a video game.

And in those days, the only way to do it
was with the cut scenes.

So, to tell the story,
which is all I care about...

Touching people.

You can't do it in a side-scroller
where they're bombing and killing and...

No, it's about telling a story.

So, those cinematics, those cut scenes,

yeah, they had to be the same quality
as when I came from that industry.

Well, I rescued mudokons,
but who's going to rescue me?

Gameplay and cut scenes were separate.

Cut scenes were like movie scenes

with the characters and backgrounds

being entirely rendered separately.

I didn't want to do it like this.

I wanted to make cut scenes

that used the game models as they were

to use those models and the camera

to tell a story to the player.

That is what I wanted to do.

There was also the player being able

to control the camera as they played.

There could be rear or side view

3 cameras above that the player

could use to control the display

and give them a sense of control.

They could change things themselves

which made for richer gameplay

that was more fiim-like.

These are two ideas

that I had wanted to work on

when we made metal gear solid.

It could be said that these have

turned into a sort of standard for us.

Even though some film-like techniques

or cuts had been used in games
up until then

the lack of camera meant each frame

had to be created individually.

These images couldn't be manipulated.

That's how it was then.

Where 3D polygons are used

the player can also move the camera.

This was the first time that we were

able to work with cameras like this

rather than just set angles.

This made me extremely happy

as I love movies and knew

about these techniques and ideas

to accomplish
previously impossible things.

Of course, in the beginning,

most people were
used to playing 2d games.

The tempo of these games
was very different.

With the shift to 3D,

what were 2d images,
now had depth.

Consequently, the camera
became pivotal

and it was down to the player
to Gauge distances.

It was very difficult for a player

to work out timings and when to brake

until they got used to it.

With earlier games,

it was easy for players to follow the
extension of a straight line,

so we made adjustments with
the 3D games to keep them interesting.

For example, when taking a corner,

centripetal force acting on the car

pulls it out around the curve,

so we wrote a program
to intentionally

pull the car back in
and control its movements.

This was pretty much everybody's
first experience with 3D,

and so we were all trying to figure out
what the rule set is.

How do you even make a game in 3D?

And everybody had a different approach.

With naughty dog and crash,
they had the approach that

they would keep the camera on ralls,

and they would calculate beforehand

every polygon that needed to be displayed
for every point in the path.

And as a result,
they could have really amazing graphics

because there was no wastage.

If that polygon was needed,
it was displayed.

If it was hidden behind something else,
they could cut it out.

To some extent, what they were doing was,

they were leveraging the incredible size
of a cd-rom for this,

because only a cd-rom could hold
that much data.

When it came to deciding
what kind of game

we ultimately wanted to make
final fantasy vi into,

we felt that it needed a large volume

of high-end movie cut scenes.

Not the real-time 3D graphics in the game,
but pre-rendered movies,

and cd-rom media

would be needed for that.

We had decided what we most wanted to do
with the game,

and concluded that

we would need to use cd rom
to make that a reality.

Our tests and discussions
led to that result.

And that resulted in final fantasy vi

coming out on the PlayStation.

Well, for us, cd did provide a lot of
storage opportunities for developers.

Yeah, more than 650 megabytes,

which, compared to a cartridge
at the time, is immense,

and, in fact, even compared to
the hard disk on a PC, it was pretty vast.

Three, two, one.

Go!

The main thing, obviously, was the cd
audio that you could play as well.

If you look at the games,
especially like wipeout and so on,

they're known
because of their audio soundtrack.

Until cds came along, most music
had been quite chip music-y,

and quite plinky-plonky kind of sounds,

and having a cd-rom and wipeout

being able to play back
a proper full soundtrack,

you know, that you might have in your car
or on your headphones or whatever,

was something new.

For twisted metal, the speed soundtrack
was just...

Speed was this movie that was out
at the time, which was a wonderful movie,

and a great action soundtrack
that still holds up.

And it just blew my mind
that I could send that soundtrack

to the composer for twisted metal and say,

"hey, can we have a climax level song
that kind of evokes this?"

And suddenly,
not only do we get something back

that feels inspired by speed,

but it's pure symphonic quality sound

because it's streaming
directly off the cd.

For the PlayStation, I think it was

exciting initially,
just to realise you had 24 audio channels.

So, they would be used
for sound effects mainly.

So you could play 24 sounds at once.

And it had built in reverb
and delay processing as well

that you could apply
to any of those voices.

So, that was great for things like,
if you were doing a basketball game,

it actually sounded like you were
in an arena,

rather than just silent background noise,

and that's what I think it really added,
more depth to the sound.

Here we go.

The PlayStation was the first console

that could use pulse-code modulation.

That's where sound is
recorded and a sample loop created

with that loop being played afterwards
as the sound.

To record the car sounds in
gran turismo, we'd rent each one

and then record the engine in phrases,
starting with the idling sounds.

We took these recordings
and made sample loops for each engine

making a tone quality
specific to each engine.

I remember now that when we played back

the cars sounds we had recorded...

We started noticing things.

Like how the pitches would drop
in pitch the farther away they were.

Or rise in pitch
the closer they were... the blur effect.

Gran turismo was probably the first game
to put these in a game, certainly.

You could have something
that sounded professional very quickly.

If you had some piece of music
that really fitted the game,

you were not restricted to any limits

regarding fitting it into ram
or anything like that.

Or constraints for memory or cpu.
You'd just say, "play this track."

So, you'd have something...

You know, a full orchestral piece,
if you wanted, in your game,

and you'd still have these other
24 channels of sound effects on top of it.

So that was really why that big leap

between things like the mega drive
and the snes,

is that you suddenly had things that

sounded as good as
if you were just watching things on TV.

In the snes era, the game screens were 2d,

and there were no voices of course,

and no cinematic movie scenes.

So you had to have music
with strong melodies.

Tunes that would still stand up,

even if you listened to them repeated
over and over.

I think our music composer,

mr uematsu was also suitably aware
of this when he composed the score.

Mr uematsu said this at the time.

When the cg animation became more 3D
with the PlayStation,

and the cinematic movie scenes
became more dramatic,

the visuals had a much greater impact.

And paradoxically,
if you used the same melodies,

the same logic for making music
as in the snes era,

then the music and the visuals would jar,
and clash with each other terribly.

This would stop the scene from coming
together and lose its effectiveness.

So when we showed strong visuals,
we would make the music more reserved,

or for moments where
the characters' emotions were high,

we would ramp up the music.

I remember feeling how
that balancing between

soft and hard had changed
from the snes era.

So in the field of music too,

the way games used music
had become closer to film or video,

the way background music is added
in films.

I think the way games were made probably
changed to have an awareness of that.

It was clear that the potential was there,
which was fabulous.

So, obviously, the big question was,
"how much will the PlayStation cost

"and will Sony be able to market it,

"and get a foothold in a market
that's dominated by Nintendo and sega?"

That was certainly a lot of the sentiment,

that, "Sony, really?"

But I think there were also
some people internally that thought,

"well, okay, maybe they can't, but they
are a consumer electronics company.

"Maybe they have the insight
that we don't know."

But over time, we heard
they were making deals with namco,

with some of these other really good
ip companies.

We started learning a little bit
about the toolsets that they're using

and how people are developing for it.

And that's when
you started to really worry.

When Sony introduced the PlayStation,

there was a graveyard
of consumer electronics companies

who had tried to enter
the multimedia business

or the interactive entertainment business.

And so, a lot of those companies
had got some nice technologies,

but not the best technologies.

But very few got

the combination of technology,
business model and creativity right.

Everybody learns
from everybody else's failures.

So, I was very worried about Sony
bringing out a game system,

and I thought there was
a very good likelihood

that they were going to be successful.

Obviously, sega was a significant
competitor and competitive threat

to PlayStation.

Introducing sega saturn.

Hit it.

Sega's next generation gaming platform.

There initially was
a lot of excitement around it,

and we were running systems
in there,

and we were able to see these incredible,
almost call them prototypes,

being run on this system.

And we thought, "you know, if we do that,

"we will absolutely corner the market
on this.

"We will be the console system."

And sega clearly had an advantage

in their rich heritage and history
of arcade games.

And so, they could port virtua fighter
from the arcade

straight onto the sega saturn,

and that would be a great title
for them to introduce the platform with.

But then we saw tekken,
and then we thought, "oh, no."

Because, you know, again,
being a consumer-facing company,

what are the consumers going to see?

They don't care that virtua fighter
is a full 3D arcade port.

What they do is,
they look at tekken and they go,

"look at how that looks.
It looks so realistic.”

You know, “I can see the face,
and it looks like a real person.”

Of namco's polygon games at that time,

our game became the model
for many other companies.

I've heard that said often.

I don't think this was because
the design was interesting.

Rather, it was the paradigm shift
in polygon technology,

from a 2d to a 3D world.

It was this intense evolution
of polygon technology

which brought about our success.

So, we thought, "no, we need to
look at product a little deeper.”

Also, I would say the biggest thing for us
and the most disappointing thing for us

was when sega took that first step forward

and announced a really high price-point
for the sega saturn.

And that kind of punched us in the gut
a little bit,

and we thought, "no,
they might be able to beat this price."

I'm going to talk to my parents
about this one.

I like this one, a lot.

You better tell them it's $399.

I'll tell them. I'll try.

In Japan, nakayama-San and others
felt that we had to really get saturn out

well before the Sony machine was launched.

And so, that was why they pushed very hard

fo introduce it earlier than
it was ready to be introduced,

before we had enough hardware manufactured

and before we had enough software
ready to play on it.

"So we better hurry things along."

Now you may return to the world
as you know it.

And remember, look for sega saturn.

It's out there.

So, the run-up
to the launch of PlayStation in Japan

was a fantastically exciting time,

because you had this new business,
this new platform,

and all of the promise and excitement
around that.

But still a certain amount of disbelief
or lack of credibility in the marketplace.

Shortly before the introduction
of PlayStation in Japan in 1994,

fo give confidence to the publishing
and developer community in Japan,

we announced that we would be

the sole distributor and publisher
of everybody's software,

so that they had a way of getting to
retail shops and getting into the market.

With cd-roms you can manufacture

a certain number in a week

so in order to ship large quantities

you needed to begin the process
ahead of time

and build up your stored copies.

Game companies want to spend

as much time as they can on development

so they like to wait until the final week

before beginning production.

There could also be bugs in the game

so both Sony and the publishing company

need to test for that.

Sony has several dozen people to do this.

But this was Sony's first game console

so they had no idea
how to test for these things.

We created the system for this

hired the personnel

and carried it out

all in the final three months
before release.

There were a lot of things
that we had to do

during those final three months

that were new for us at Sony.

And we had a program
to get to 100,000 units, day one.

That was a milestone
that we wanted to get to in Japan,

so that that would be a real big number

that we could talk about
in the games press

and talk about in the business press
to show that we were serious.

And to make 100,000 units of a PlayStation
was no small undertaking.

The maximum number of units

for a Sony product

such as the walkman

on the day of release

was 5,000 or 6,000 units.

If you wanted to put out 20,000 units

you would be told that it was too many.

The idea was to begin production slowly.

Sony couldn't move slowly
with a game console.

Companies were getting ready
to release games.

Hardware has no value without its software

so if a company is aiming to publish

100,000 copies of a title

then at a minimum

you need 100,000 consoles ready.

Given this,
we needed to produce the PlayStation

in mass quantity,
right from the beginning.

This was completely different

than Sony's usual approach at the time.

Also, we needed to have the consoles

delivered to stores all on the same day

in order to stimulate game sales.

So, it was just this great symbiosis
of clever people doing great things.

There were no boundaries and there was no,

"well, you're doing the Japanese launch

"and we're doing this,
and you make the games."

It was just this big, flat, enthusiastic,
you know, committed team of people.

We had, I think, six or seven
games available, day one.

Everyone remembers Ridge racer,
and rightly so,

as being the game
that was probably the most exciting.

But then there was a whole host
of local Japanese content that came out

that really made
the PlayStation successful in Japan.

At one point, we had over 2,000
registered developers in Japan alone,

which shows you just the breadth and depth
of creator talent that we had.

The PlayStation was obviously
a much more powerful machine

and, you know, totally devoted to,
"okay, let's build a machine

"where the focus is that
this will play games.

"This is built entirely around
playing games."

There was no kind of pretence for,
"this is a computer."

This is a games machine.
This is an arcade in your home.

That's the beginning and the end of it.

All games gather here.

We had a hit.

We knew we were off and running
to a very, very strong start.

Lots of playstations
were exported from Japan

and brought home
to the us and the uk and Europe

by a lot of the development community.

I would imagine at least 10,000
of those 100,000 ended up going abroad.

You could buy a Japanese PlayStation
at the computer exchange

on rathbone place.

And they had a sign on the window,
"the mutt's nuts."

And the word was out.

And that actually made our job
in the us, in Europe, much, much easier,

because people could see the machine,

they could see the excitement
that was coming out of Japan,

they could play the games,

and they could see the quality
of what was possible.

The hype machine had already started
so people were champing at the bit for it,

and I think what they did with the price
was the final nail in sega's coffin,

because they undercut them
to such an extent.

It was the first e3,
and e3 was held in Los Angeles.

We had a very big booth. We knew Nintendo
would have a big booth, and sega.

Sony computer entertainment was headed up
by a fellow named Terry tokunaka.

A very wise owl.

Typically a dignified Japanese who would
not say a word for, like, three hours,

and then say one or two words and that was
the end of the meeting, you know?

But he was smart.

We had a lot of competing tensions.

The guys who were making the hardware
want it at margin,

the guys who were marketing it
want the lowest price possible.

You've got to look at
what the competition are doing.

And he was thinking about his cost in yen
and what the prices could be,

and the price debates were 350, 399

and 299.

And they said, "no, we can't do it."

So, the senior management from Japan left,

and then olaf olafsson stayed behind
with Steve race.

Steve race said, "we've got to do 299.

"299 is the only thing that matters.

"It's the only thing that matters
in the whole wide world.

"And if you don't want to be embarrassed,
you've got to be at 299."

So, olaf said, "let me think about it."

As far as pricing is concerned,

the only thing we knew at the time
is what the bill of materials was.

So, then you have to step away from that

and say,
"well, what will the market stand?"

You know, "what's
the right price point for this thing?"

And I think, probably the guy
who was most influential in that was olaf,

because people like Ken and Terry tokunaka

just wanted desperately
for this thing to be a success.

They know they've got
a great piece of hardware.

They know they've got
a great software catalogue.

The only thing that can go wrong now
is they miss their market somehow.

And then, we all went our way

and showed up the next morning
for the big press event at the e3 centre.

And they had a speech from Nintendo
and they had a talk from sega,

and there might've been something else.

It finally came up. "And now, Sony.
So, well, show us your stuff, Sony."

And they had all had,
like, 30 minute talks.

Steve race gets up,
walks up to the podium and says, "299."

Walks off.

The place erupts.

I'm going to ask Sony computer
entertainment president of America,

Steve race,
to join me for a brief presentation.

299

It was the thing that was needed,
especially for the us market,

where the competition was even stronger
than I was worried about in Europe.

I mean, you had these two monoliths,

and every third attempt into the market
had been squashed very easily.

I think that decision
was probably the right decision.

Probably a bit scary
when you look at the p&I,

but it was the right decision.

It set our intent as a platform

and it completely destroyed
the competition.

My reaction was, "shit, we're in trouble."

That this is a bad thing for sega
and a very good thing for Sony.

We started to see the response
from retailers

in the United States, in Europe,

and starting to forecast
what our launch was going to be.

And we started to see the volume
that was starting to be forecast.

The games are ready. Are you?

And I knew that
we were doing something special.

I knew that what we were doing

was not only reaching
the creators and the developers,

but this was starting to permeate into
the mass market.

But we knew that it was risky days,
you know.

We knew that we had games
to get us out the door,

keep us going for a few months,

but the library had to be built.

And therefore,
it probably wasn't for a year or so in

until we could look back and see that,
actually, yes, we were getting traction.

We could see the pipeline of games
was filling up,

and we could see developers
really coming on board then.

That gave me some confidence
that I had made a good career choice.

It was a wonderful thing
for the games business,

because it was a real shot in the arm.

It unlocked everybody again.
It hit reset on all of the sequels,

and people just trying to
keep washing the dishes at that point.

We all get to hit reset and start again,
and here's new hardware.

And anyone that wanted to
compete against Sony

had to show up
with pretty impressive hardware.

So it kind of...
It moved the industry along.

I like those kind of disruptions.
I think it's very helpful.

Very quickly,
we had a really rich variety of games.

People were taking
the 3D abilities of the machine

and sending it off
in lots of different directions,

from an NBA basketball game
through to jumping flash!

The Japanese platform game,
which was just gorgeous.

Ready to go?

Sony would get in
every game ever published for PlayStation.

And so, we would have this cabinet
of just everything.

And it was just, you know...

The games you would expect...

You know, the Madden,
the gamedays, whatever.

And then,
it was obscure shit from Japan

that you're like, "what is this?" Right?

And the two things I remember

was this game called something like
super big brother,

is what it was translated.

And it was a side-scrolling game

with digitised characters
like mortal kombat arcade,

but they were these buff,
almost naked dudes,

shooting shit out of their, like, penises.

Three, two, one, go!

We laughed and laughed about this game.

And then there was a wonderful game
that was called...

I think it was called incredible crisis.

And it was just a collection
of mini-games,

but the way they had done it

was it was tied together in the story

of this Japanese salaryman
and him dealing with his family,

and dealing with his... I think, like,
his teenage daughter and his wife.

And it was the first time I had played
a game where it was fully interactive,

so it wasn't just like cut scenes,
but it was...

It was really cool.

They told this very mundane story...

Not totally mundane.
There was crazy shit happening.

But, you know, for video games
it was a very simple story

about just this guy,
this mild-mannered guy,

with these crazy mini-games.

We never got things like that in America.
It was just too weird.

But I loved seeing a lot of those...

For us, obscure Japanese games

when they would come into
the Sony offices.

Battle arena toshinden
was the first 3D fighting game

that we had on the console.

Tekken, which came along, which is
still amazing, still felt very 2d.

It's still very much that mortal kombat,
street fighter kind of...

Even though there's
some fantastic finishing sequences,

where law would run up the body and then
come down and there was 3D within that.

It was battle arena toshinden
that truly showed off the early 3D

gaming potential.

Gran turismo. For me, one of
the greatest driving games ever made.

What an impact, what depth, what realism.

What addiction. I played that
for 18 months solid, two hours a day,

and I still don't think
I completely nailed it.

Then there was parappa the rapper,

which is just so weird,
and nuts and wonderful.

And vib-ribbon. See,
vib-ribbon is the kind of game

that you'd never have seen
in the cartridge years.

Who would have taken a chance
on a game like that?

But here we were in the '90s
with vectors on the screen.

You know, lines.
And it's like, it's cool, it's great.

I remember playing driver.

At the time, I was like,
"this is unbelievable,"

because I hadn't played
that kind of style of game

where the police are chasing me before.

And I found it so fun.

And that's the kind of thing, again,
that the new generations deliver for us.

It was the first real open-world
driving game, was driver.

And it required new techniques,
such as streaming the data,

the geometric and texture data
off the cd drive in real-time,

so it didn't stop, pause,
load and carry on.

And I think we really...
We pushed the machine hard.

It was smoking
by the time we'd done with it.

But the very early development stages
of driver,

it was very, very touch-and-go

whether we could achieve it,
the open world.

Because most games at the time

were designed along, basically, a tube.

You could see everything in front of you

and you could control
what you couldn't see.

Driver, of course, you could turn
left or right at a junction.

It had to be aware of what was there.

It was controlling other cars in the city
and people walking around.

The speed at which we were able to grow
the development community,

particularly in the west,

was down to embracing the PC creators.

The PlayStation development kit

actually became a card
that just slotted inside a PC.

And so, a lot of the tools and techniques
and capabilities of the PC developers

were able to come over to PlayStation
quite smoothly,

particularly in the areas
of advanced 3D graphics,

where obviously
PlayStation was positioning itself.

What was so nice
about the original PlayStation

was that it was more like a PC
than a console.

That's what made it really, really easy
to develop for, as well,

because it had architecture that was
a processor, a graphics processor,

which was what pcs hadn't got
at that point, but they soon did.

And it just worked.

It just pulls across the PC code,
and the graphics engine pulled that across

to use the graphics hardware.

So, it was a very, very nice machine
to work on.

We didn't have to change any designs
to be console specific

because we created everything on a PC.

We knew our limitations on the PC.

Sometimes, things didn't quite work out,
or we could adjust it fairly quickly.

More so, things like how much we
could display on screen at one time.

And as an artist,
that was a fair bit of guesswork, really.

But, certainly, even testing the games...

From our point of view,
when we created a level,

and output the game version,

everything we did was on the PC,

to the point where,

when we came to testing the game
at the end of the project,

and we actually had to pick up
a PlayStation controller to do it,

that was a big deal for me.

'Cause suddenly I had to try and translate
everything I'd been doing

on my keyboard on the PC

to what I was doing on the console.

And believe you me, they made us
test those levels on that console.

It was hard work.

The other side to this whole thing

could associate with a female character
in a game.

Now that was something
we hadn't anticipated.

But we suddenly had a market
for female gamers as well.

Lara croft, without doubt,
the poster girl for that generation.

And I think the character
and the personality of Lara croft,

it started to take storytelling,

which is a feature of gaming
that has developed in sophistication

immeasurably over
the successive generations.

But, I think,
with tomb raider at the time,

the concept of storytelling in video games

manifested itself
to a really meaningful extent

probably for the first time.

Part of the PlayStation experience was

it wasn't just big titles like crash
or tomb raider or the like,

but also these conceptually driven...

You could almost call them indie titles,
like xi,

which I think was sold as devil dice
in this country.

Or 1.Q.: Intelligent qube.

The jump from 16-bit to 32-bit
was so incredibly significant.

I just got it straight away.
I knew that this was going to be huge.

Metal gear solid, final fantasy vii,
resident evil,

time crisis, dino crisis.

Games would come out which were
just enormous for PlayStation.

The n64 was a different experience

as that came up and bubbled up
halfway through.

But it didn't really take over.

Nintendo really dragged its heels
over getting into 3D

and launching a new machine.

'Cause, you know, for obvious reasons.

The super famicom, the snes,
was doing great guns,

and it was reinvigorated
by the likes of donkey Kong country.

But at the end of the day,
it was still a cartridge system.

For every one launch on the n64,
there were a dozen PlayStation titles,

because they could just bombard
the market with it.

I remember
in the early days of PlayStation,

you would see somebody go in,
get the console,

and get, literally, a stack of games
to go with it.

Sony's marketing of the PlayStation was,
I thought, incredibly exciting.

It didn't necessarily focus on games.

It just focused on this kind of new world

that people were going to be exploring
and getting into.

And I think it was brilliant at the time

because there was very controversial
elements to some of the marketing.

But it was something that really captured
people's imaginations,

in terms of,
"this isn't just a video games machine."

The us were very, very traditional
in everything they did.

I think there was an element
of free thinking that was in Europe.

Hello, citizens of Europe.

As spokesperson for s.A.P.S.,
the society against PlayStation,

I'd like to talk to you about a menace
threatening humanity.

We launched
with kind of a silly commercial,

a reefer madness kind of concept.

The anti-PlayStation society,

the society against PlayStation, s.A.P.S.

It will ruin your kid's brain
and they'll come out jabbering monkeys.

So, it was aimed at the parents
and really at the kids.

And here we have a fellow
who's been experimenting with PlayStation

for only a few minutes.

Proof that we s.A.P.S.
Must be on our guard.

Remember, do not underestimate
the power of PlayStation.

You had some really, really talented guys.

You know, Geoff glendenning,
who's a really, really clever guy.

And he didn't just think posters,
print ads, that sort of thing.

He was looking at how he was
going to get all eyes on PlayStation.

When I'd seen the PlayStation,

I felt that the market couldn't sustain
three console companies,

and therefore, I also believed

that with the technology,
with such a big leap,

that we could reposition it
to a much older market.

A lot of those people had been gamers,

but had grown out of

where the market was ostensibly targeting,

which was really children
of 16 and under, I'd say.

So, they were left with no form
of digital entertainment

other than music and film.

So I think PlayStation
kind of filled that gap.

But you were not going to fill that gap

unless you associated with
what those people were doing at the time.

And at the time, you know,
the club scene was big.

There had been a massive youth movement,
if you like, in the uk.

Very much unique, globally,

that came out of the late '80s
kind of rave culture and club culture.

By 1994, 1995,

was the biggest youth movement
in the history of youth tribes.

If you put together
through the 20th century,

you know, the mods, the rockers,

the hippies, the new romantics,
the skinheads.

Every youth movement came nowhere
near as close as the participants

who took part in club culture.

Uk dance culture in the '80s
saw the birth of the rave scene.

And ministry of sound came along
in 1991,

and was civilised raving, if you like.

Ministry of sound, I guess, was
the best nightclub in the uk and globally.

It had become a global brand
and it was taken from

the big New York warehouse clubbing scene,

and ministry of sound
was the first super club, if you like.

But in 1995,
they were having a huge refit.

I wouldn't call it upmarket,

but we had to remove
the gaffer tape and the scaffolding

and start to build proper structures.

And we built two things.

One was an absolut vodka bar
in conjunction with absolut.

But there was another space,

and that was where
the intrigue and the idea started.

And that saw the birth of the famous
PlayStation room at ministry of sound.

This PlayStation room,
which was kind of just painted black,

with black consoles
and black tvs on pedestals,

and, you know, you step down into I,

so it's almost like
going into a little lair.

And it seemed such a natural thing to do,

to bring video gaming
into a club environment.

PlayStation really made gaming cool.

Because, you know, you had two brands
that were huge and successful,

brilliant game designers,

but in the public perception,
you know, you had Mario and Sonic,

and they were perceived
as being very young.

And so, when you had
a grown-up brand like Sony

that made your mum and dad's television
and your walkman and all the rest of it,

actually coming into the market,
it was exciting.

And I think, that, coupled with
the marketing at the time...

Suddenly, you'd open a copy of the face

and you'd see hip kids wearing
the PlayStation logo,

and they probably haven't played a game
in their life,

but if they're embracing the brand
as being something cool,

then that's kind of what made the whole
video games market explode, I think.

For me, the quintessential PlayStation ad
of all time

that still gets a good 10,000 hits
a month, written by James sinclair,

headed up by Trevor Beattie at tbwa,
was double life.

For years I've lived a double life.

In the day I do my job.

I ride the bus,
roll up my sleeves with the hoi polloi.

But at night,
I live a life of exhilaration.

Of missed heartbeats and adrenaline.

And if the truth be known...

A life of dubious virtue.

I won't deny
I've been engaged in violence,

even indulged in it.

I have maimed and killed adversaries,

and not merely in self-defence.

I've exhibited disregard for life...

- Limb.
- And property.

And savoured every moment.

You may not think it to look at me...

But I have commanded armies...

And conquered worlds.

And though in achieving these things...

I have set morality aside...

I have no regrets.

It still gives me goosebumps
whenever I see it

I think it's utterly timeless.

If you put it up now on TV,

it still would be as fresh as it was
back then.

You just had to see
the amplification effect

of all the marketing and promotion,

and games was cool.

And we were now
a mainstream entertainment brand.

We were no longer a toy.

And it wasn't "geeks," and I say that
in the most respectful way.

Weren't geeks that were playing games.

It was the "cool kids"
that were playing video games.

It was an amazing time as a game creator

and as a game player.

That first PlayStation took away
so many of the limitations

that we'd had in the past.

Suddenly, cartridges...
Didn't have to worry about cartridges.

We had 600 megabytes on the cd-rom.

As far as hardware went, powerful,
and in 3D as well.

It was a revolution.

So the hardware team
behind PlayStation one...

As soon as the hardware was finished,
they went on to two new projects.

They went on to a cost-reduction project,

which was same format, same capability,
but just making it cheaper and cheaper.

The second team, the advance team,
then went and started working on

a version of the PlayStation chipset
for the arcades.

Before the PlayStation
was released as a home console,

work was already underway on
namco's system 11 arcade board.

This board incorporated some
of the PlayStation architecture,

such as the cpu, which was
developed by mr kutaragi's team.

What namco was most surprised by

was the cost, how cheap it was.

To be able to make something
with that capability

for that price, was pretty surprising.

What mr kutaragi was
trying to do at that time,

by making a low cost polygon chip

available to the global market,

marked a paradigm shift
in the polygon era.

Although namco had a board

with better polygon
technology and capabilities,

this was an interesting
business model for us,

and we continued
to work with mr kutaragi.

And once that project had been finished,

the team behind that

then started to think about
what was going to be PlayStation 2.

Those days were quite a roller-coaster
of new hardware to play with

because we were also looking at
pocketstation as well,

which was going to come out in "99
in Japan.

And so, we heard
the PlayStation 2 was coming.

We heard that it was essentially
taking some of the experiences

that our colleagues in Japan had,

and it was going to be the next iteration
of hardware.

But not just an evolution.
It had to be a revolution,

because it also had to last
for a good decade.

And we had to take the best hardware
that we could at the time

to create that PlayStation 2.

And with PlayStation 2, we built
our own chip manufacturing facilities

and we invested a huge amount of money

in designing our own graphics chip
and hardware,

that meant we were much more in control
of our own destiny.

We could build a much, much
higher-performance device

that would leapfrog orders of magnitude

beyond what even the PC
and the workstations were doing.

There was quite a shock

when people found out
what kind of hardware was in ps2.

Because I think we all expected ps1 plus.

So, PlayStation one had been really neat,
very easy,

compared, to say, with the saturn,
for example.

So everyone expected the PlayStation 2
to be more of the same. And they didn't.

They actually produced something with,
you know, 16 processors

and chips doing this and chips doing that.

So it was an absolute nightmare,
'cause it was nothing like a PC.

The ps2 is very much geared
to do polygonal 3D.

I mean, that's pretty much what
everybody used it for,

and it does it at a much faster rate
than the ps1.

And one of the biggest differences
between the ps1 and ps2

is the speed of access
to the graphical memory.

On the ps2, the speed of access
to the graphical memory

is just ridiculously high.

It finally let us do these
frame-based graphical effects,

and stencils and shadows

and all this extra stuff
that we couldn't do until then.

And then you had the two vector units,

which were incredibly awesome,

super-high throughput
vector-processing designs,

with their own weird buses and dma
and very small memory footprints.

And, like, no typical software
would ever run on them.

You basically had to write
really custom assembly engines

to power these things.

And that's what most people didn't do.

Like, we had a ton of them
in jak and daxter,

and you could basically,

fifty to one hundredfold the speed
of some particular operation,

if it was something that could be done
while in the vector unit,

and you spent, like, two months

crafting a vector unit system
to handle it.

But it made the program
enormously complicated.

You had to get really down and dirty
with this hardware,

and get really comfortable
writing, you know, simple programs,

but you're uploading
into these vector units

that are impossibly challenging to debug

when something goes wrong, and things
can go wrong in so many different ways.

When I started at Sony Japan,

I started working behind closed doors,
basically, on the PlayStation 2,

and I wrote simulators to simulate
what the new chips would be doing.

They were called the vu1 and the vuo.

Kutaragi at the time was saying
that he wanted non-polygonal 3D,

even though it didn't really quite
come to that

initially, I kind of managed to make
a system using the vu1 chip

that would actually break down
curved data into polygonal data,

and then spit that out
to be rendered as polygons.

So, eventually,
the final stage was polygons,

but the data which was being processed
wasn't polygons.

It was just curved data information.

And so, using all these techniques,

I managed to pull together
this duck-in-a-bath demo

with, like, water and reflections,

and, you know, using all these techniques
we didn't have access to until then,

which most people don't realise
isn't using polygonal data.

It's using curve surface data,

which at the time
was very new, very different.

Phil Harrison had come to foster city

and he showed us this water demo.

And I remember exactly the words.

He's like,
"can you just imagine Lara croft..."

Who was ruling the roost those days.

The biggest game out was tomb raider.

He's like, "can you imagine her
diving into that water?"

And it just fired everybody's imagination.
Certainly mine.

Like, "oh, my god, yeah,
this is next level stuff."

I was invited in very early
on PlayStation 2,

as were naughty dog and insomniac,

because we'd been creating
these big titles for PlayStation one.

And, in particular,

I ended up going on a sabbatical to Japan
for three months,

and working out of a locked room
where the very first prototypes were kept.

I was sitting side-by-side with the people
who were making the demos

that would be used for the announcement
of PlayStation 2.

But my role was not to make a demo.

My job was to do the early work
that hopefully would lead to the engines

of what became ratchet & clank
and jak and daxter.

Man, that stung!

I told you we shouldn't have come here
and you listened!

What?

With jak and daxter,
we went to open world,

taking a cue off Mario and banjo-kazooie,

but we wanted to try to make
more intense gameplay

with the open world,

and there was
a lot of learning curve there.

With PlayStation 2,
we were finally able to have vistas.

I mean, we could not restrict the player
to a smaller area

like we'd been doing on PlayStation one.

You could see into the distance,

you could see where you were heading
as a player.

That was one of the core concepts
behind jak and daxter.

Let's have this broaa,
completely connected world

and just let you explore it.

And I don't feel
that would've been possible

at any reasonable level
of graphical quality on PlayStation one.

We pursued this whole
giant, seamless world thing successfully,

but it was just brutally difficult
on the design and the technical aspects.

We had fo deal with
the PlayStation itself,

which, like, to Max out involved...
Just in that one game,

we rewrote most of the main systems,
including the graphics systems,

sometimes, like, five times.

We knew the theoretical performance
we could get out of some system,

and because the other ones,
while they function,

we just weren't near it,
because it was so difficult.

So we would just keep
rewriting and rewriting

till we got closer and closer
to the theoretical performance.

We had a lot more power,

but the expectations were so much higher
for what people wanted.

Ps2 had been...
It had definitely been hyped,

and we had been part of the hyping
process, right? We were all excited.

We went from 2d to 3D,

and now we're going the next leap forward
in terms of what 3D can be.

So, we had to come up with ways to render

much more complex objects, larger vistas
and more detailed characters.

And our intent was to demonstrate

that we could move
beyond the PlayStation one.

We could take advantage
of the PlayStation 2

and build these immense cities,

and at the same time,

not move too far away from this love
of comedy, these stylised characters.

Please return your appendages
to the steering mechanism, sir.

Right. Sorry.

And by the way,
you can stop calling me "sir."

The name's ratchet.

Pleased to make your acquaintance, sir.

You got a name?

My serial number is b54296...

I'll just call you clank for short.

The leap from PlayStation one
to PlayStation 2 was massive,

and people could feel... as exciting as
PlayStation one was going for 3D,

the extra processing power,
the emotion engine that the cpu...

And running off a DVD,

again, gave so much more freedom
to the developers.

With orange games,
who became guerrilla games, at the time

had a great prototype called marines
that they were calling a budget shooter.

It didn't quite work out as being
a "budget" shooter,

but it turned into killzone
and it was fantastic.

And I remember
when they first showed helghasts

dropping down wires from the ship
into the battle,

it blew you away, and you knew what was
going to be possible on that platform.

They've got me pinned down!

In my mission
to subdue the success of Xbox,

I went on a massive campaign
looking for exclusives,

because we had signed up tomb raider,

and in Europe,
we had formula one on exclusive.

And exclusive titles sell hardware.

We were in Los Angeles
at the sunset Marquis hotel

and I called up Kelly Sumner

and said, "tell me anything you've got
you want to talk about exclusivity on."

So he came with this title called
"state of emergency."

It was a little title about
some sort of a disturbance, a riot,

and people running into electronic stores,
running out with tvs and things.

It was a great title. It did well, too.
It was funny.

And then I did something with eutechnyx
called big mutha truckers.

You know, so they weren't all big.

But Kelly, at six o'clock
on the night before e3,

he said, "well,
we could talk about Grand Theft Auto.”

I think, if you ask guys,

"if you could do anything you wanted to do
tonight, what would you do?"

"I'd shoot my boss,

"I'd drive a fast car.”

And so, I think
that's part of what made gta successful.

It was giving people the ability
to realise their fantasies.

I said, "okay, Kelly, let's do it."

And finally,
the us demanded in on the deal,

but they didn't want to know anything
about it when I first did it.

They weren't into paying for exclusivity,

but I said,
"rule number one, two, three, four.

"Install the base."

How do you install base? Exclusive titles.

It was one of the first games
I think I played from beginning to end.

It was just hugely compelling,
and, you know, you felt like

it was a little bit morally dubious,
but it was just brilliant fun.

Stop!

You know, it always amused me
when you'd read media reports about,

"you could do this, you could
kill these people or do whatever."

But the reality is
you don't have to do those things.

You're driving around a city
that's a full living city

and there's people on the sidewalk.

You don't have to drive over them.

If you've got a sandbox where you can do
whatever you want to do,

you know, that's something
that's quite revolutionary.

I don't think gta could've been done
on PlayStation one.

I think it would've been
incredibly difficult to do.

They were incredibly powerful machines,

but you had to be a magician
to actually make it do what you wanted.

We were really pushing things,

and I think we'd had the experience in 3D
to make gta,

and like the concept of streaming.

Streaming was a big risk.

You couldn't drive inside a machine,
constantly move for 24 hours straight

and not melt.

It ended up it did work.

Yeah, I think Grand Theft Auto is the game
that most people would refer to as

the moment that games grew up

and became more than
just a form of trivial entertainment,

but actually could become as important
as movies or music or literature.

Liberty city is in shock today
as the police and emergency services...

Ps1 to ps2 felt, again,
like a significant upgrade

in terms of graphical prowess
and all the rest of it.

You know, kutaragi-San
talked about the emotion engine.

You know, all the chips had their
little names, like the emotion engine,

and this whole premise,
"could a video game make you cry?"

It was like...
For a game, it was inspiring that,

you know, this empowered people
to tell stories

that could actually really move you

in the way that a really good song
or a good film could move you.

The process of moving from ico
to shadow of the colossus

wasn't entirely smooth.

Personally, I was happy with ico

and players were happy with it too.

Take lighting as an example

a lot of video imagery at that time

was not preoccupied with shadow
and contrast

there was a lot of pre-rendered
and cg video around

and games with loud and flashy graphics

I was interested in more subtle approaches

to shades and tones
that were closer to reality.

I think that's what differentiated us
at that time

but it wasn't a great commercial success

so I came up with shadow of the colossus.

But whether it's the story,
the backdrop, the movement

it's all about making the player
believe the characters are real,

that they exist for real in that world.

For me, that's what it's all about.

The most effective way
of bringing characters to life

is through the story of that world.

I always incorporate a story in my games

but I don't necessarily create games
to tell stories.

The significance of PlayStation

for me personally

I feel I was able to become a
games designer and developer

because of PlayStation.

My favourite game of the ps2 era,

and I hope what many would consider
the reference work of the ps2 era,

was god of war.

The gods of Olympus have abandoned me.

I would put god of war up there as one of
my top five video games of all time.

There is no god of war
without ray harryhausen,

and there is no god of war
without raiders of the lost ark,

because those two things...
Down to the fact that when kratos,

in one of the first levels of god of war,

pushes his body up against this pillar

and uses his lower body strength

to kick the pillar
fo cause it to collapse...

I'm telling the animators, like,

"look what Indiana Jones does
in the well of the souls

"where he kicks that giant Anubis statue.

"That's exactly what
I want this to evoke."

And that was what god of war
was really built on,

is the desire

to make a playable version of raiders
or clash of the titans

that makes you feel like the star
of those movies.

So, I put all of these...

At the time,
decades of wannabe film director

into this one product,

and said,
"this is my shot to express that."

That was the beginning and the reason
god of war exists

in terms of why I pitched it.

How much is enough, kratos?

When will it end?

When the glory of sparta
is known throughout the world.

"The glory of sparta."

We knew we would have to use
some cut scenes,

but we really wanted to try to do
as much storytelling in gameplay

because we knew that that would be
a more powerful way

to express storytelling.

Suddenly, we were like,

"you're going to be experiencing
more than just this gameplay.

"You're going to be taking on the role
and the emotional impact

"of this scenario.

"We want you
to step into the sandals of kratos,

"who is this vicious killer.”

And so, it was just
a lot of conscious gameplay design

about wherever we could fit character
in gameplay,

that was always the way we would go.

And it was very hard to do,

and it added a lot of stress to the team
and a lot of time to the schedule

because we were saying gameplay
and storytelling can be fused together,

and they really should be the same thing
where we cah do that as often as we can.

So that was a big pillar, philosophically,
when it came to developing that game.

Sony PlayStation 2 will be
the biggest thing to come along

since TV was invented.

I'm ready. Everyone's ready, right?

Who wants a PlayStation 27?

Ps2 was definitely a lot more powerful
than the first PlayStation.

It was a quantum leap
in terms of what it could offer.

But what a lot of people
maybe don't remember

is that for the first couple of years
there wasn't that much coming out for it.

Especially not from third parties.

Why? Because it was
an absolute pig to program.

If I'm going to be polite about it.

Because, unless you'd had some grounding
in assembler,

you were never going to get the best
out of that complex hardware.

So that was the price you paid.

Yes, you get more power.

The price you pay

is you have to know how to get
the best out of those vector units,

which meant old-school
assembler-like skills.

People did get it eventually.

And I think, had PlayStation not had
the momentum from PlayStation one,

then they might have found it harder
to convince people

that the ps2 was an amazing system.

It was an amazing system,

but people had to invest a lot of R&D
to start to get the best out of it.

So, you had to wait two, three, four years

for the third parties
to find their feet on ps2.

But when they did... you know,
the results speak for themselves.

Silent hill 2.
The visual leap was notable.

You know, you went from having
very, very obviously polygon shapes,

to suddenly rounded characters that are
moving within these 3D environments.

Gran turismo really showed off,
graphically, what it could do.

And then you get tekkens for it.

The visuals are so, so much better.

It wasn't just Polish,
it was a sense of ambition again,

and people were
just having fun with it again.

The ethos of "anyone can create
for this" was still there.

We'd had a lot of success with formula one
on PlayStation one.

We took the licence
for world rally championship

and that first wrc just blew you away

in terms of a look of a racing game
at that time.

You look at games
that came out of the London studio

like singstar and eyetoy: Play,

their game interface
was either the camera for eyetoy: Play,

or a microphone for singstar.

So it made it a lot more inclusive,
and it's something

I think PlayStation's always been about,

wanting to include
not just publishers and developers,

but all sorts of different players
as well.

Pro evo really exploded at that point

and PlayStation 2 was the era
of pro evolution soccer.

It's coming back now
in terms of its popularity,

but everybody would go and play pro evo.

Harry Potter, lord of the rings...
Big licences were selling bucketloads.

I mean, I remember one Christmas,
ps2 came out

and you had Harry Potter,
one of the lord of the rings titles,

FIFA and Grand Theft Auto,

and just selling tens and tens
of thousands of these things.

So, hugely successful era for Sony.

I think for buyers of the PlayStation,

who loved the brand
and who loved the product...

I think it was maybe a little bit of
an easier sell

to say this is the newest, latest,
upgraded version of what you love already.

I think that was probably
not as challenging.

I mean, the marketing at the time
was fairly left-field.

David lynch came in to direct the advert.

It was brilliantly surreal.

Where are we...

Disembodied arms
coming out of people's mouths,

talking ducks wearing suits and stuff.

It was straight out of twin peaks.

Welcome to the third place.

PlayStation 2. The third place.

And I loved it.

And I don't think anyone understood it,

but, you know,
when you're that enigmatic a brand

people kind of imbue you
with all sorts of wisdom

when they see crazy stuff,

and, you know, it obviously joined
the ranks of all the other advertising

that we'd done with Chris Cunningham
and the likes of that.

Space pixies and all sorts.

And, you know,
it became part of our history.

One of the little-appreciated facts,
and it's almost rather mundane,

is the fact that the ps2 was a DVD player.

And we were by far the cheapest DVD player
on the market.

So, certainly, we were principally,
primarily, a video gaming console,

but having that secondary feature
of being a really cheap DVD player,

that helped us a lot.

And in Spain, the size of the market
tripled overnight

because our managing director,
James Armstrong,

made campaigns about DVD.

And, of course, the Japanese
PlayStation people went berserk.

"You should've been advertising gt."

"Hey, you know, people don't have DVDs.

"They're going to have fo pay
the same price

"for a DVD player as a PlayStation."

I said, "buy a DVD player
and get a PlayStation free."

It was kind of the message.

And it worked. Spain had
an amazing success with that positioning.

Amazing.

PlayStation 2 has set the benchmark
in terms of ambition, even today,

for what modern video games
can and should be,

in terms of storytelling, epic graphics,
open world,

action, fun, excitement.

Absolutely.

Because the ps2
was such an enormous success,

I suspect PlayStation as an organisation

felt like

they could get away
with pretty much anything.

And a $2 billion investment
into a brand-new chip

that was touted as a supercomputer

could be seen as probably

the bravest gamble ever made,

or one of the most dangerous follies
ever committed by a large company,

or, potentially, one of the greatest acts
of self-harm.

You could spin it either way.

The blu-ray drive when blu-ray
wasn't quite ready.

It was like a version 0.9 blu-ray drive
that was in the original ps3,

which was a vastly expensive thing
to manufacture.

For an engine developer, the ps3 was...
It was a really unique beast

with the cell architecture.

To me, I felt like...
A little bit of, "holy crap, I've gotta...

"I've got to rethink a lot of things
to make good use of this."

When we heard about the PlayStation 3,

we saw an opportunity to get out early
on a platform,

something we really hadn't done before.

And the opportunity to be a launch title
was incredibly enticing for us.

So, we came up with resistance,

this world where the earth's history
was different,

thanks to the arrival of an alien species.

Russia and Europe have fallen.

Resistance: Fall of man was challenging
in a lot of ways.

It was our first launch title.

So that made it hard,

just because you're dealing with hardware
that's...

Hardware that's new,
the documentation isn't there yet,

the operating system
is constantly getting changed around,

you don't know how much memory
you're really going to have at launch

'cause the operating system
is taking a chunk of it.

In some sense, it was an awesome design

for how much power you could get
for the price.

And in another sense,
it was so different than everything else

that it was hard for people
to take advantage of it.

I learned a lot of things
in the process of working on resistance.

One of the big ones was
don't do a launch title.

Particularly, don't do a launch title

for a hardware as complex as
PlayStation 3 was.

It was perhaps the most difficult project

that I have worked on in my career.

Yeah, launch titles. Yeah, nerves.
There's a lot of expectation.

But so exciting as well.

And trying to push things
as far as you can

on a new platform, in a fixed time frame,

it's the biggest challenges
you're going to get

as a creator or a developer.

Motorstorm, / think, was one of
the definitive products for PlayStation 3.

You're building ahead of the launch
of the hardware, install base zero.

So, Sony have a role to play there,
to invest in the product with you.

And it becomes one of
the definitive properties on PlayStation 3

because it's new.

Right? Because it's innovative.

Motorstorm, fo me, epifomised
what a launch title is all about,

something that's fresh and innovative
in an existing genre.

Planet earth.

Or as the rest of the omniverse call it,

the orb of dreamers.

The birth of littlebigplanet was

we'd managed to organise a meeting
with Phil Harrison,

who was the top man at the time
at Sony.

Phil Harrison really latched on to
the user-created content side of it.

I was really getting excited

by this idea of being able to make a tool
that lets you make games,

which kind of felt like part of
my spiritual mission somehow. It's like...

"Well, back in the day I remember
how excited I was about making games

"and how hard it was
to get into the industry.

"We can do this thing that allows people
to make games on consoles,

"which is otherwise really inaccessible
for them to make games on."

And then, Phil Harrison says, "well,
we want to show this at gdc.

"We've got this big announcement thing
and we'd like to show it there."

And we were like, "okay, no pressure."

To Sony, who were actually getting
quite a hard time,

you know, with the PlayStation one and 2.

They'd been really successful.
When you used to go to computer shows,

getting a ticket to the Sony party
was like gold dust.

Everyone wanted to go to the Sony parties,
'cause they were so extravagant.

They used to spend
ridiculous amounts of money.

But by the time we'd hooked up with Sony,

they were starting to get a lot of flak
in the press.

PlayStation 3 was too expensive,

and they were gelling
a lot of negative press, essentially.

We showed littlebigplanet at gdc

and it literally seemed
to turn the tide overnight.

Suddenly, there was all this love
and attention

coming towards Sony
for backing this thing.

And it got to the point where
Sony said to us,

"well, this sackboy character
that you've got, we really like it.

"We're kind of thinking of using it
as the mascot for the PlayStation 3."

We're like, "that's amazing."

It's like Mario or this kind of stuff,
you know. It was great.

So, I mean, that was obviously the
basis of a great relationship with Sony.

We liked what they'd done for us and
they liked what we did for them, and...

I don't know.

We've been happily married ever since,
to be honest with you.

Dear PlayStation,
I got my boyfriend a ps3,

and he still hasn't hooked it up
to the Internet.

- What? What is this, 19927
- I know.

I mean,
if you're not on the PlayStation network,

you can't get PlayStation home,
ps one classics,

- you can't download movies, TV shows...
- I know!

It's like having a bathroom
without an aromatherapy candle.

- Still gets the job done, but come on!
- He hates...

Back then, the ability to
sell your games digitally only

and make the games digitally
from the ground up,

meant everything.

Because up until that point,
every design decision you made was about,

is it compelling enough
to put in a $60 box

that the buyers at toys "r" us
or best buy or target or Walmart

are going to vibe with?

And you were a slave
to that $60 price point,

and you were a slave
to make sure that your content

had to appeal to those buyers.

And now suddenly, that we were going to
open up a digital storefront,

and we could make games
that were only two hours,

we could make games
that cost $4 versus $60.

Literally, that's game-changing,
because those shackles were now removed.

So, with calling all cars!,
it was us going,

"let's make a game that
we grew up playing, like arcade games,

“or games we played in college,
like NBA jam or NFL blitz or whatever.”

And that was the impetus,

that we would have never been able to
make that game on ps2 or one,

not because of the technology,

but because we couldn't convince retail
to carry a game that small.

I gave an interview once where
I compared calling all cars! To a pop song

and god of war was an opera.

But we could never make pop songs.
Now we can make singles, right?

So that was awesome.

So ps3 was many things
to many different people.

It was definitely a difficult period,

because a lot of work had fo be done

to turn around the technical deficit
and the monetary deficit

created by the launch
of this extraordinary piece of hardware.

'Cause it was an extraordinary piece
of hardware.

It was also extraordinarily hard
to get the best out of.

But people did,
and it did eventually turn into a success.

But, my god, was that a war of attrition.

The ps3 clawed it back.

It lost Sony huge amounts of money
over its lifecycle.

I mean, they sold a hell of a lot of them,

but it was by far the least
profitable console Sony's ever had,

and it took, actually,
Sony years to recover from that.

The PlayStation that emerged
at the end of ps3

was a much more gritty, determined,
focused entity

than, I would say...

And I'm not saying this
in a personal perspective,

but from a corporate perspective.

A much more hubristic organisation
at the beginning of the ps3 era.

This fast healing stuff
is going to come in real handy.

Before we launched the ps4,

there were some observers
who rightly or wrongly thought

this could be the end of Sony.

Not just PlayStation. Sony.

There was a lof at stake.

And because of this, I have to say,
I'm enormously impressed

by the bravery and the vision
of the leadership of the organisation

fo deliver a focused device,

one that was much less confused
and much more developer-oriented again.

It was like going back to the beginning.

"Let's make a machine
that developers love."

In the early days,
we were riding on hardware.

We used hardware.
It was very bespoke in some cases.

It took a lot of time to get to grips
in a lot of cases as well.

But the individuals that were involved
were small in number,

but able to make it happen
on PlayStation.

But the time we get to
the PlayStation 4 era,

we're talking about much larger teams.

Not everybody is a specialist
in console hardware.

We had to make it far broader in appeal
to games teams.

And I think with PlayStation 4,
we succeeded.

So the strategy was set,

the hardware was focuseaq,

and all that remained
was launch and reception.

Partners were there,
developers were involved.

Even independent developers were involved
in the launch of ps4.

The pricing had been set.

Decisions about drm and so on,

which had been so controversial
in other events,

had also been made.

I think even we were surprised

at just how rapturous
the reception was for ps4.

Because it was a kind of redemption
as well.

We'd been through the fire with ps3.

And now everything was on the line.

We had to get this right.

And if we didn't,
it could've been the end.

What we didn't expect

was that it would be
such an incredible success,

beyond our wildest dreams.

But it was the tone with which
we communicated the whole thing...

"This is for the players.”

This is for the players.

For those that leap into battle
in the blink of an eye.

For the drivers
that compete for their club

no matter where they are.

The entire focus of launch
was around players.

You remember the hubris
from the ps3 years.

Contrast that with the honesty
and self-deprecation

of the ps4 launch period,

and you can see that the organisation
had become transformed,

to people who were now humble,
passionate and excited

about this new thing.

Battle-worn but ready to serve again.

That attitude, that spirit

that all began with the first PlayStation.

One of the things
we can say about PlayStation

throughout the history is

there's always been innovation there.

Obviously, on the hardware side,

you know,
right back to the first controller,

and then the dualshock
and the systems on from there,

you know, there's always been
a desire for innovation.

And I think
that's always been partnered with

a strong desire and a commitment
to innovation in gameplay.

Play station's always been passionate about
a breadth of experiences

and giving new, different,
innovative experiences to gameplay.

You know, you can take that
right the way through to vr,

which is, again, about bringing new,
different kinds of gameplay experiences,

to people.

You know, it's something
that PlayStation's always been strong on.

Never shy to commit to providing

a really strong, innovative lead
for the industry.

Virtual reality, which, as yet,
is an unproven space,

but we're really intrigued
and really excited by it.

I think developers are still continuing
to come to terms with

what makes a great virtual reality
gaming experience.

On a normal game,
you'll just get all the gameplay in

and you'll optimise at the end.

But on a vr game, you have to be optimised
right at the start,

and you kind of have to work
within that constraint.

So you're starting with a...

"We must have 60 frames a second,
90 frames a second,

"120 frames a second.”

And that's the key thing
that you have to hit.

If you don't do that,

then you're going to be in problems
all the way through your development.

We also...
We have this slightly silly expression,

which is a lot of our ordinary
non-vr games,

turn everything up to 11.

You need to saturate the player
and excite them and get everything going.

Well, we actually had to reverse
that ruling in vr.

We had to turn everything down to seven,

because turning things up
to 10, let alone 11,

was just too much.

You couldn't cope with it.
Your mind can't cope with it in vr

if it's that much going on at the time.

You need to pace things more carefully
in vr.

When I look at vr,
we're now inside the game.

Now, you think as a game creator,
as a game designer,

that's a paradigm shift totally.

'Cause we're taking it from the television

and putting the player
inside the game now.

I think that vr will be a major shift.

In the games up until the present

all of the video, screens, etc.

Have been put into a square layout

that 1s there to hold information.

We've had film as a medium

for over 100 years now
and this is the first time

that we've broken through this frame.

Being able to now create
art, film, and games

that don't fit into this frame,

and the question

of how to go about expressing this...

I think that the next 2 to 3 years

will major for this medium

in terms of how creators and artists

will use it, and what they will create.

Yeah, there are a lot of tricks and tips
and things that everyone's learning in vr.

What you can do, what you can't do.

Can you move the camera? Can you not?
How do you move around the environment?

You've got to match the visuals
with the feeling of movement,

and other stuff like that.

So, and we're all learning all the time.

We're pioneering
a new form of visual language,

just as the early filmmakers
had to work out how edits work,

how fades and dissolves,
how cutaways work.

All of that kind of language,

which most people watching something
won't even think about,

because it's just something
they intrinsically know

from watching lots of telly and film.

And in games,
we have the same kind of stuff.

But in vr, that language doesn't work
in the same way.

You have to unlearn those edits,
you have to unlearn that fade.

You can't use those things any more

because they just don't work.

Because it's your view
and you're in that environment.

If you jump somebody to another location,
it feels weird,

because you physically jumped,
but you haven't physically jumped.

So, you get a disconnect
between the senses

and your rational,
kind of calculating part of your brain.

So we are dealing with inventing
a new set of grammar

for a new kind of medium.

And I think the distinction between

what's a gaming experience
and a non-gaming experience,

which hitherto has been, you know,
really clear, really binary,

I think those lines will start fo blur

and you will have vr experiences
with a certain

light touch of interactivity,

but which still technically
might be games.

Some of those could be some of the finest

virtual reality entertainment
experiences you will ever have

but they will be very simple to enjoy.

So I think there are
a lot of opportunities in vr

that we haven't got a clue about.

But it gives you...

It's ultimately immersive.

You're through the looking glass in vr.

I've not met anybody yet
who's experienced vr

who's not been blown away by it.

I think people get the excitement of it,

they get what they see now,

but they also get where it can go
in the future.

The legacy of PlayStation

and the intent of PlayStation
is in the name.

It was to combine play, fun, entertainment

with what you could do with technology
from a workstation.

And that's where
those two words come from.

"Play" and "station,"
meaning "PlayStation" together.

I think that Sony put together

a fantastic team for the PlayStation.

They had members from both Sony
and Sony music

two entirely different teams.

And there were people like me

coming from outside of Sony.

All three types of members

put their heads together
for the PlayStation.

This incredible product

would never have been created

if Sony hadn't decided on making
the PlayStation.

A lot of people from different fields

were able to come together

and work on gaming hardware.

The biggest thing I took away from it

was being able to participate in this.

The success was not just about
the hardware.

We were very lucky with cd
coming to fruition.

The opportunities that cd provided,

but also, I think, we were able to provide
a product which was very affordable.

It was appealing to
quite a different age group

than other machines at the time.

And, therefore, it was a combination
of hardware, marketing,

but also some great developers

who were able to fortunately make the leap
from 2d to 3D,

because that was not a given
in those days.

And bringing all these things together,

ultimately, we were fortunate
in our success,

but the success was not without
a lot of hard work.

I think the most lasting legacy
of the first PlayStation was that

as it was a cd-rom-based hardware
and succeeded in the marketplace,

that meant that, finally,
the economics started working

for the game creators
rather than against the game creators.

PlayStation has been a massive step,

a massive moment,
for the home console games market.

I think what PlayStation brought to it...

Obviously, innovation
and new ways to play,

but also this inclusive spirit.

We really wanted to include
the best talent, the best creators,

third parties, publishers,

because we know the more people
we can include

making games,
making the best games possible,

the better it is for the players.

And we've always put the players

at the heart of
what PlayStation should be about.

When I first joined the PlayStation
team I was in my early 20s

and one thing that everyone
was talking about then

was the desire to make playing
video games a cooler activity.

Everyone was saying that.

This was one of the goals
in making the PlayStation.

Perhaps then, it's fair to say

that their goals have come true now.

Video games are definitely
a normal part of our lifestyle now.

The fact that adults can play
them without feeling self-conscious

is a pretty major effect
that the PlayStation

has had on us, wouldn't you say?

I personally feel that this is so.

They've done so much...

You know, ip creation, wonderful games,
wonderful tech,

now into vr.

But I think one of the core things

that PlayStation really did
for the industry was really

throw those doors open to everyone
and say, "games can be for all of us."

It's not just this very small niche hobby.

It is a viable medium of entertainment.

And now, a real Japanese guy
from a really big Japanese company.

In Japan.