Sony's PS1 turned 30 at the end of last year, and this year marks the 30th anniversary of the console's launch in the West.
Former President of SIE Worldwide Studios for Sony Interactive Entertainment, Shuhei Yoshida, has been speaking to GamesIndustry.biz about the arrival of Sony's legendary 32-bit hardware.
Yoshida – who retired this year – was part of the PlayStation story from the very beginning; in fact, he was closely involved with the project when it was still a CD-ROM drive for Nintendo's SNES.
The "Father of PlayStation", Ken Kutaragi, used to invite Yoshida to play around with prototypes of the machine. "The system was already done and almost ready for manufacturing, and a few games were already finished," Yoshida recalls. "I played one game that was a space shooter, but still, it was based on Super Nintendo tech, right? So it was limited."
Ultimately, Nintendo baulked at the notion of Sony taking royalties on SNES PlayStation software and famously backed out of the deal at the Consumer Electronics Show in June 1991, instead inking a new agreement with Dutch electronics giant Philips. A plan to produce a different CD add-on for the SNES was quietly cancelled before any hardware was prototyped, but we did get some Nintendo-themed CD-i games.
At the time, Nintendo's walking away from the deal was something of an embarrassment to Sony, which had struggled to gain a foothold in the growing gaming sector up to that point. However, in Yoshida's eyes, it would prove to be a positive event for the company.
He feels that the failure of Sega's Mega CD add-on for the Mega Drive / Genesis proved that bolting optical media to existing 16-bit systems was not the way forward; he feels that the concept was "very limited compared to the actual PlayStation," and that it was "almost helpful that Nintendo cancelled the project – otherwise the Sony team would have been stuck as part of a Nintendo system."
Indeed, history has proven this to be the case; divorced from Nintendo and aching to prove its worth, Sony gave Kutaragi the blessing to turn the PlayStation concept into a fully fledged console – and you know the rest of the story.
"Nintendo created their big competition," Yoshida tells GamesIndustry.biz. "But competition is always healthy. Now, Xbox, Nintendo, PlayStation seem to be going in very different directions, and I think that's great for the overall industry."