As I got older in high school, Gaming technology was moving very fast, just about everyone I knew had a Sony Play Station. We would invite each other round to play multi player games. Play new titles we bought. It was a gaming phenomena that was almost going to be produced by a different company all together.
Sony in the late 80's was well known for electrical appliances, TV's, Radios, Speakers, Music CD's, VHS Tape players and the Walkman, to name but a few items they made since world war one, when Sony helped rebuild Japan. So how did Sony go from that to becoming one of the most prominent gaming companies today along side Microsoft's Xbox consoles?
World wide, since the late 80's, Sega and Nintendo were butting heads for control of the gaming market. In 1991, Sega introduced to the world the Sega CD, this allowed games to use up to 600mb of data, for 1991, this was huge, and the games that followed were better than ever before. At the time Nintendo had planned on releasing another cartridge based system, but the technology wasn't there to process the amount of data Sega was offering, So they turned to Sony for help.
Nintendo wanted an add on peripheral for their Super NES and be sold under the Nintendo name, so games could be sold on cd and benefit from the larger/faster storage. When the 2 were sold as a package it was simply called the Play Station, and the package was exclusively sold by Sony but with the Nintendo brand.
An Engineer by the name of Ken Kutaragi who was a brilliant visionary and idealist, was the man who helped in the design of the peripheral for Nintendo SNES. Shortly after its release, Ken approached the CEO of Sony and said that they should make their own CD based games console and enter the gaming industry, CEO declined stating that Sony is not a toy company and never will be.
Behind the scenes Nintendo were uncomfortable about Sony retaining the rights to the CD's, cutting them out of a huge profit margin, and with Sega CD becoming more popular and Nintendo loosing out on vast amounts of money, they then approached Phillips Electronics and asked them to make the peripheral and if they did, Nintendo would work out a better contract for the CD rights. All behind Sony's back.
After Nintendo made the announcement that they will be working with Phillips instead, Ken goes back to Sony's CEO, tells him the news, Ken said we should make an entire game system. Feeling bitter over Nintendo's back stabbing, The CEO agreed and wanted to crush Nintendo and drive them out of the market.
The first design of the Sony Play station could play both CD Rom's and Nintendo Cartridges and made 200 prototypes. These were scrapped and they then waited for the next generation of CD based games consoles so they could capitalize and lead the market. And in 1993 Sony Announce that they are working on a 32 bit console dubbed, 'The PSX'. The brain of the console was designed by Ken Kutaragi and in late 1993, Sony forms Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. as a sister company of Sony Corp and Sony music. The chip he designed was faster and more powerful than anything else on the market at that time, and by a large margin. It was able to push more polygons than ever, the tools available to developers was extensive, it made it easier to develop games for than any other console and combined with the simplicity of the design, was cheep and easy to make.
With Sony able to do all the manufacturing in-house and create and distribute the CD Rom's using Sony Music. Cost were very low and eventually that reflected in the price. But having a fast hardware and good looking wasn't enough to break the market that was dominated by Sega and Nintendo, so Sony went on a very aggressive campaign to game developers to show them what the Sony is capable of, to get the software created that would set the Play Station appart and catch the hearts and minds of the consumers. Demoing Virtual Fighter on the PS for developers proved to be a huge success. Eventually in the space of only 4 months, 250 game developers signed on to make third party games. Sony also Bought Signosis for about $50 million, which was an European game developer and renames it 'Sony interactive entertainment', so it could code the games and design alongside other developers.
Before Christmas in 1994, Sony dropped the X of the name and released the Sony Play Station in Japan. In less than 3 months in Japan alone, Sony sold 1 million units which far surpassed anything else at the time and before.
To release to the rest of the world, Sony spent just shy of $4 million for a booth at E3 in 95, complete with a full steam add campaign including, TV adds, radio, magazines, posters, bus stops, buses, road side adds, setting up dummy consoles behind glass in upwards of a 50'000 stores and setting out sales reps to get pre orders before the release, to name a few ways they got the 'word out'.
On the 9th of September, 1995, the Play Station was a released. Initially 800'000 units were shipped to the US alone, and in less than a month had sold out. It was a similar story in Europe too.
The Price of £299 combined with great hardware and software, most of which were exclusive titles, is what made the PS1 so popular when on average other consoles were selling at £399 but was an inferior product, and no one wanted them.
By the time Sony announced the launch of the PS1 successor, the PS2 in 2000, Sony had sold over 100 million consoles. At the time the most ever sold.. ever... it wasn't until PS2 had its heyday and was replaced and that sold over 155 million. Ever, To this day. Even the ps4 and x box one have sold less than 50 million units each. In 2000, there were over 1'800 games to choose from, most of which were produced by Sony Music, the total number sold is over 2.6 billion copies. And is, to this date, remains the most titles sold for any console.
Sony Changed the face of gaming forever and Ken and the CEO eventually crushed Nintendo and Sega out of the industry, to this day. Sony is one of 2 giants in the gaming market.
Thanks for reading.
Images...
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-07-03-ultra-rare-sony-playstation-snes-console-spotted-pictured
http://www.retrocollect.com/News/unreleased-super-nintendo-cd-rom-drive-technical-documents-leaked-online.html
http://www.pushsquare.com/news/2015/09/feature_the_making_of_the_sony_playstation
https://www.taringa.net/posts/imagenes/15919147/La-consola-que-no-fue-super-nintendo-playstation.html
https://www.giantbomb.com/playstation/3045-22/games/
http://www.flipsandflops.co.uk/valuable-ps1-games/
nice post i like it vvvvv
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