Middlesbrough is probably the last place we expected to meet Ken Kutaragi, widely known as the father of the PlayStation. He admits he hadn’t heard of the northern UK town before he was invited here to give a talk at the second Game Republic New Horizons event on October 15.
But speaking to GamesIndustry.biz after his keynote, he says he’s warmed to it. “I am very amazed. It’s a very, very strange city,” he says. He comments on the town’s industrial past and its newly emerging tech sector, home to studios like Double Eleven, Dink, and Behaviour Interactive. “It’s getting on to be a very exciting new industry. Not yet, but small studios are now gathering.”
Kutaragi led the development of the original PlayStation and later went on to become CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment, before stepping down into a non-executive role in 2007 after being replaced by Kaz Hirai. Since then, the 76-year-old has gone on to head Cyber AI Entertainment and Ascent Robotics, as well as becoming dean of the Faculty of Information Science at the University of Kindai.
Given all that, he doesn’t have time to play video games these days. “I have two companies, and I have to manage a very big organization,” he says. “I [had to] give up something. That duty was finished.”
He does keep one eye on the industry though. When asked what he thinks PlayStation should do next after many of its live-service investments failed to pan out, he says it’s not just PlayStation that faces a challenge, but the games sector more widely. He thinks we’re going to see a change of paradigm in the games industry.
“Taking several years with several thousand people… is meaningless. It’s almost impossible.”
The path to PlayStation
Kutaragi’s father was born in Taiwan, which until 1945 was under Japanese rule, but his parents moved to Tokyo before he was born in 1950. In a city devastated by the Second World War, his father set up a small printing company.
“I was a very sick baby,” he recalls. “I had a lot of illness.”
“Because I was so sick and I could not walk and run around with my school boy [friends], I had to sit on the ground and watch. But the brain, every day the brain is dreaming many things. This is the reason why I read many books.”
He was a curious child, he says, and would take apart anything he could get his hands on to see how it worked. “I tried to disassemble everything and return it back to the original form,” he says. He always managed it. “Perfectly. I’m proud about that.”
It’s interesting to note the similarities with Atari founder Nolan Bushnell. Bushnell, who is seven years older than Kutaragi, was also an inveterate tinkerer who set up his own TV repair business as a young teen. Likewise, Kutaragi turned his hand to repairing technology. “I competed with professional repairers of Sony products,” he says.
Kutaragi still likes to tinker now. “I try to fix many things within my house,” he says. “I can repair anything right now – computer things, car parts.” He has many old cars, he says, and if he can’t find the right part, he will make it himself.
All of this is how he ended up securing a job at Sony’s digital research labs in the 1970s. “When I joined Sony, I said I would come to be the number one researcher. I was so confident. I’m so curious to know and curious to create many things.”
Famously, while working at Sony, he went on to design the sound chip for Nintendo’s Super Famicom, then worked on a CD-ROM add-on for the console, dubbed the Play Station. “I did the prototype for Nintendo as a subsystem,” says Kutaragi. “I had never thought about it being the starting point for the current PlayStation franchise.”
“The story says I was super shocked and decided to take revenge, but I never thought about that”
The pivotal moment came when Nintendo suddenly switched allegiance, partnering with Philips rather than Sony to develop the Super Famicom CD-ROM. Kutaragi remembers it being a “bad shock”.
“But it changed to being a good shock: OK, we are free to do anything.”
Kutaragi then set to work on making what would become the Sony PlayStation, released in Japan in 1994. He credits Sony’s CEO at the time, Norio Ohga, as being the only one at Sony to back his mission. “He loved my challenging spirit,” he says, adding that the CEO, who died in 2011, had a good nose for business. But he downplays the story of the PlayStation being an act of revenge against Nintendo. “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]”
Current challenges
Commenting on the current games industry landscape, Kutaragi says that whereas gaming platforms were once affordable, they’re now “super expensive” and beyond the reach of most people. “Who can buy a super expensive PC? No one.”
He thinks the future of entertainment lies beyond video games. “For me, communication is the best entertainment,” he says.
Given that Kutaragi heads both an AI and robotics company, it’s no surprise that he foresees a merging of the two. “Did you have a chance to see Blade Runner?” he asks. He references Rachel, the replicant created by the Tyrell Corporation, who believes she is human.
“For me, communication is the best entertainment”
Is this where things are going, we ask? Are we going to have real-life Rachels in the future?
“Not right now, but it’s coming. Currently the androids made in China have fewer integers, but if those things can be connected to the network or intelligence, each body [can have] some personality.” He sees a future where humans communicate with AI personalities. “Communication is the best entertainment,” he reaffirms.
Returning to the question of how he sees things in the games industry playing out, Kutaragi takes a dim view of the current situation. He repeats that in his personal opinion, taking “huge money” and “huge time” to make modern games is “meaningless”.
“And the story is fixed,” he adds.
“I visited the Tokyo Game Show this year,” he says. “Nothing changed. The graphics were a little bit improved, but every other thing was the same.”
In his keynote talk at New Horizons, Kutaragi suggested that the current situation is “not healthy”, with PCs costing the “price of a car”. He warned that alongside this, the rise of AI systems could mean “we don’t need any console.”
“It’s very dangerous,” he said.
