But players were horrendously expensive, with an entry-level device costing around £600.Īt less than half that price, the PS2 was the perfect stealth technology. At the time, DVDs were the hot new format. His big idea – the one that arguably secured victory for Sony in this latest round of the console wars – was to bundle a DVD player with the PS2. In one key meeting with Sony North America executives, two senior members of the company’s board, who had flown in from Tokyo, found themselves reduced to translating for Kutaragi as he laid out his vision for where the PS2 would take Sony. Superiors recalled him speaking to them as if they worked for him, rather than the other way around. I was swept away with this feeling and committed myself to succeeding,” recalled Shigeo Maruyama, former chair of Sony Computer Entertainment.Īs with the lead-up to the PlayStation launch, Kutaragi was not one for taking prisoners at Sony. “We had to win the battle against Nintendo we had to win over the internal opposition within Sony we had to get this entire endeavour off the ground. “PlayStation” had been copyrighted by Sony, and the project was too advanced to call a halt. By the time he recovered, it was too late. Fate intervened in the cruellest fashion when Morita suffered a stroke. He even overcame the doubts of Sony founder Akio Morita, who saw the merit in video games but hated the name PlayStation. What if Sony ditched the Nintendo angle and proceeded with the rest of the plan? What if it did PlayStation on its own?Īgainst considerable internal opposition, Kutaragi made his dream a reality. It even had a name: the Nintendo PlayStation. Sony had actually made a prototype device to show to Nintendo. He was also convinced he had seen the future – a future in which Sony got into gaming independently of Nintendo. Sony “had learned about the pending press conference 48 hours earlier, and were… stunned”, wrote David Sheff in his 1993 book Game Over. But then, to Sony’s shock, it backed out at the final moment and instead announced an alliance with Philips at a 1991 press conference. At that point, eight months after the PlayStation 2’s launch in Japan, it seemed the console could do virtually anything. Sony, meanwhile, had to obtain a special permit from the Tokyo Trade Ministry to export a device that, in theory at least, “could be adapted for military use”. But not before the Pentagon had thoroughly investigated the rumours. Speculation that Saddam was “hoarding” hundreds of box-fresh PS2s in order to harness their extraordinary processing power was eventually debunked. The name of the technology was the Sony PlayStation 2. It would allow Saddam to upgrade his guided missile programme and place many targets in the west within reach, went the whisperings. In December 2000, reports began to circulate within intelligence communities in the United States and Europe of a powerful new technology acquired by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
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