The Story of PlayStation

THE STORY OF PLAYSTATION

(PlayStation. Image from wikimedia commons)

In terms of Biblical analogy, Sony at the beginning of their entry into the videogames market could be described as David. But what had happened to Goliath? The market leader, Nintendo, had been forced to miss out on the early part of the 32bit wars because of the legal repercussions brought about by the Sony/Phillips affair. They hoped that the strength of their name would be enough to shift units as and when a new console appeared.

Nintendo had been talking about its next-gen plans for some time. On August 23rd 1993, the company disclosed ‘Project Reality’. This Project Reality seemed to have a couple of weapons that could prove useful in the coming war. First off, the technology was to be the result of collaboration between Nintendo and Silicon Graphics. The latter company had provided the workstations used to create digital dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and liquid robots in Terminator 2. A modified version of this technology would be squeezed into Nintendo’s new console. The second advantage was that the company intended to leapfrog the 32bit era and launch their machine with a 64bit engine. Nintendo seemed convinced that this would give their rivals some sleepless nights. Sega and Sony have world-class 32bit systems. But…we will be marketing a world-class 64bit system at the same time.

It seemed that Nintendo had a mighty warrior waiting in the wings, an Achilles of the console market, if you will. But, like that seemingly unstoppable fighter of legend, did it have a crucial weakness? Critics suggested that this was indeed so, when Nintendo confirmed that they were sticking resolutely to cartridge. The company had seen the downfall of CD-based machines like 3DO and CD-I, and were no longer working with Phillips. Detractors pointed out the many negative sides to cartridges, namely capacity and cost. A cartridge had less storage space than a CD (8 megabyte capacity as opposed to 640 megabyte) so it seemed safe to assume that this meant games on Nintendo’s machine would be small in comparison to Sony and Sega’s efforts. Also, it cost $20 to manufacture a cartridge and $2 to press a CD. This, the critics said, could only lead to a situation where Nintendo owners paid more for less.

(Cartridge. Image from wikimedia commons)

The videogame giant saw things in a different light. It pointed out that, while CDs were indeed cheaper to make than cartridges, they had a far slower access speed. To make up for this, CD-based machines required lots of expensive internal memory. Nintendo believed that this meant CDs wouldn’t be much cheaper than cartridges and that it could match its competitors for price and still make a profit from big sellers. The company had other problems with CD-ROM. There was no way that the data could be loaded all at once, which meant games had to halt while the additional data was loaded. Nintendo didn’t want its machine to suffer from this. Also, and this is probably the most crucial downside, a CD was just too easy to pirate. Nintendo explained that this factors cast a dark shadow over the CD dream. The critics suggested another possible reason. If Nintendo stuck with cartridges, they would have complete control over the manufacturing process and this would maximise profits. Howard Lincoln (who was the President of Nintendo Of America) hotly disagreed with these accusations: I’ve seen speculation about how this was some plot to control third-party developers. That’s complete nonsense.

(Donkey Kong Country. Image from donkey Kong wiki fandom)

So it went on. Nintendo kept drip-feeding the videogame industry press with snippets of information. In the meantime, the release of Rare’s Donkey Kong Country proved that there was life left in the humble SNES and that it could hold its own in the face of Sega’s 32X. As for ‘Project Reality’, Nintendo revealed the name of the console at the 1994 Summer Consumer Electronics Show. It was to be called the Ultra 64. Months later, on January 1995, it was announced that Silicon Graphics had completed the chipset and that the machine would go on sale that same year. Nay Sayers argued that there was no way this Ultra 64 would be on sale in 1995 and that the videogame community would have to wait until the following year to get their hands on it. On May 1995, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal called Jim Carlton noticed something odd about a certain third-party developer’s annual report. The company was Acclaim, who was developing games for all three formats. But, while they had earnings projections for Saturn and PlayStation sales, no such information existed for the Ultra 64. The reporter asked Acclaim why this was so, but all he got was a ‘no comment’. Next, he called Perin Kaplan, who was the Marketing and Communications Manager for Nintendo. The game was up. The following day, Nintendo announced what some had suspected all along. There would be no Ultra 64 until 1996, at least...

REFERENCES

Revolutionaries at Sony by Reiji Asakawa

The Ultimate History of Videogames by Steven L. Kent

Trigger Happy by Steven Poole