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The genesis of PlayStation is a story that is familiar to many people, even those who were lucky enough to be alive when it happened.
The narrative goes that, after being jilted by Nintendo over its SNES Play Station hardware, Sony decided to turn the project into a stand-alone competitor, and the rest is history; the 32-bit system triumphed over the N64 and Sony has cemented itself as Nintendo's biggest rival on the home console business.
Ken Kutaragi, the man who spearheaded the PlayStation project, takes issue with the way this has been portrayed over the years. Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, he goes as far as to say that revenge was never the objective, even if Nintendo's actions came as a "bad shock" at the time.
"The story says I was super shocked and decided to take revenge, but I never thought about that … I didn't think that we had to crush [Nintendo]," he explains. He adds that the "shock" changed to being a "good shock: OK, we are free to do anything."
Kutaragi spoke at the second Game Republic New Horizons event in the UK and revealed that he no longer plays video games. "I have two companies, and I have to manage a very big organization. I [had to] give up something. That duty was finished."
Despite lacking the time to actually play games, Kutaragi still has some choice words for the future of the industry. He thinks that games "taking several years with several thousand people… is meaningless. It's almost impossible," and feels that the current market is "not healthy" due to the high cost of gaming hardware – a result of the rise of AI in recent years.
It's ironic (or perhaps not, given that Kutaragi is involved in an AI company) that he sees AI as a way out of this situation, since it could mean players "don't need any console" to get their interactive entertainment.