"The father of PlayStation" says everyone at Sony thought the PS1 would fail when it was first pitched

Ken Kutaragi, often referred to as “the father of PlayStation” for overseeing the development of the PS1, PS2, and PS3, says initially no one believed PlayStation would succeed in the hardware space.

Speaking at the 2024 Tokyo Game Show official keynote (timestamped here), Kuturagi took us back to early 1993, a little less than two years before the PS1 launched in Japan. Kuturagi said he and other founding members traveled around the world to get opinions from various developers, and apparently was met with a whole lot of negative feedback.

“We wanted to share our passion,” Kuturagi said. “And we wanted to hear what their expectations were and what they did not expect, so we wanted to hear from them. So we visited dozens of companies, if not hundreds, we visited a lot of game makers, it was a great memory … they were not interested at all. They just said, ‘Don’t do it. There were multiple companies and none of them were successful. You are going to fail.’ That’s what they told us.”

Obviously, Kuturagi and co. didn’t listen to the naysayers and went on to prove them wrong in dramatic fashion, but it’s fascinating to know PlayStation faced so much pushback in its very early days. “Even within Sony, nobody believed that we would be successful.”

I’m also deeply curious about the reasons these developers and Sony employees were so sure the PS1 would fail. Kuturagi mentions some people saying other video game hardware makers had failed, and there were definitely plenty of commercial duds from the late-80s and early-90s that might’ve inspired some trepidation, but damn, talk about tough love.

Fast-forward to today, as PlayStation gets ready for its 30th birthday in December, and Sony’s throwback PS5 Pro bundle has sold out just as quickly as fans found out how much it actually costs.

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