While many can say that the “gaming industry is easy to break into,” that couldn’t be further from the truth, and that goes double for today, where layoffs are happening all over the place, and unreasonable “experience” expectations are sometimes asked for certain jobs. The other catch is that because of the “name recognition” of the “Big 3 Publishers,” if you wanted to try and break into the industry via a new console, the barriers you’d have to overcome would be numerous and significant. That also applied in the 90s for one Ken Kutaragi, who helped bring the original PlayStation console to the world.
To rewind the clock a bit, at the time when the original PlayStation was getting made, Nintendo was dominating the market in many respects, and its main rival in SEGA wasn’t doing too bad either, especially with its mascot in Sonic The Hedgehog. Even with that, Ken Kutaragi felt that Sony could do something bigger and better with the PlayStation. However, as he noted at the Tokyo Game Show, some told him not to go through with it:
“We wanted to share the passion. We wanted to hear their expectations 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. 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, they were wrong on that, and the PlayStation helped “change the game,” pardon the pun, in numerous ways, including shifting the way we store games from cartridges to CDs. Not to mention, it was on the PS1 that certain franchises got overhauled, like one from Square Enix that became one of the best titles ever, and new franchises were born featuring characters like Lara Croft, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro The Dragon, and so on.
Now, one could argue that the state of things back in the 1990s was a bit more “fluid” than they are right now, as proven by how Sony has been trying to make the VR gaming market “a thing” and failing, or how Google attempted to break into the industry with the Stadia, and failed miserably.
However, even with those failures, it’s clear that it was a good thing that Kutaragi didn’t listen to the detractors and pushed things forward. If he hadn’t, then the gaming space would look much differently today.
