The day after the Play Station was unveiled, Nintendo said it was working with Philips on the CD-ROM drive for the Super NES; Sony looked like dupes. CEO Norio Ohga was furious.
But like good businessmen, they had to work together. Sony still wanted to port Super NES cartridges and Nintendo was using Sony’s audio chip in the Super NES—a chip Ken Kurtaragi himself had developed in secret for Nintendo while working at Sony.
But Ohga was still smarting. He instructed Kutaragi to begin working on a new project, which is why Kutaragi is now referred to as “the father of PlayStation.” The Invented PlayStation PlayStation
Rather than upset the apple cart even further, Kutaragi and his team were sent to work in a different division: Sony Music. Over the next two years, several things happened: Sony worked with Philips (again) to create the first DVDs. Sony almost struck a deal to work with Sega, but instead stuck with Nintendo (again). And Sony never manufactured more than about 200 Play Station consoles. This was all despite the formation of Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) in Japan in November 1993 and Sony Computer Entertainment of America (SCEA) in May 1994.
The era of the so-called fifth-generation video game consoles had hit. In 1993, the 3D0 and Atari Jaguar were the first CD-ROM-based devices with 32-bit capability. Finally, Sony execs gave the go-ahead for a full build of the PlayStation.
In 1994, perhaps the biggest turning point came when SCE showed off 3D video game possibilities to a couple of potential partners: Electronic Arts and Namco.
When the Sega Saturn and the original Sony PlayStation debuted in Japan within weeks of each other in 1994, the real competition began. The $299 PlayStation, which didn’t make it to North America until the following year, cost $100 less. (The 1996 cartridge-only Nintendo 64 marked the beginning of Nintendo’s ongoing lateness streak.) playstation
Not long after the SCE division became the most successful of all Sony’s divisions. The PlayStation’s worldwide sales by the time it was discontinued in 2005? 102,000,000 units in 9.5 years. (That’s in combination with the PSOne from 2000, a PlayStation redesigned for portability which, for that year at least, outsold the original PS.) Compare that with the Nintendo 64’s 32.93 million. The console was praised by even Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft at the time.
